A Qualified Defense of Elizabeth Gilbert.

Julia Roberts

Julia Roberts is going to play the lead in Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert’s 2006 memoir that was on the best-seller list for hundreds of weeks. It makes a lot of sense to combine everything in the world we despise into one entity. Now we don’t have to divide our loathing for Roberts’s toothy, over-earnestness and Gilbert’s trip around the world, a journey so self-indulgent all the countries she visited started with I. You can lump them together in one sublimely satisfying ball of hate.

I can only imagine how terrible the movie is going to be, but I’m about to confess something that I’m pretty sure is going to make one of my friends disown me; I don’t think Eat, Pray, Love was all that terrible a book.

Sure, Gilbert is self-obsessed, and there’s way to much crying and “healing” for my taste. I love yoga, but I’m not sure I can take seriously anyone who practices meditation. But that’s the thing about Gilbert. If you really read her book, all of it’s a little tongue in cheek. And Gilbert knows how to write. She’s engaging and comes across as a real character with a voice, which might explain the visceral hatred with which some react to the book. If you don’t like Gilbert, then you’re not going to like it. Most importantly, though, she knew what people really want to do in life.  We’re just all a little jealous we didn’t think of a way to turn it into a book proposal and make some money off it. (Though hopefully we would do it with a little less eroticization of the places we visit and without the implicit suggestion that all Indonesians are swindlers.) We might not have been able to articulate it before, but everyone’s fantasy is to spend any given year eating pasta and learning Italian, getting skinny doing yoga for real and then isolating ourselves on a beautiful island and meeting a handsome Brazilian. Especially when we’re a little sad.

And about the sadness, the truth is, some of that’s a little fair. I know the immediate response to seeing someone say goodbye to their bourgeois life in Connecticut is boo-fucking-hoo, but, having lived in Connecticut for a couple of years I can tell you that if I had owned one of those big houses that’s always clean (seriously, their houses are always spotless! like they’ve never been lived in!) and all I had to do was pop out a couple of kids, I wouldn’t say no right away. But eventually I would say no.

Which was the only part of the book where I connected with Gilbert a bit. I’m not trying to minimize how hard going through a divorce is, but I imagine it must be, even when the marriage is bad. I just left a job and a town I hate, and I admit I shed a little tear when I pulled away for the last time. The thing that jumped out at me most, though, was not that she was leaving her marriage, but that she was deciding, with some finality, not to have children. Which is the kind of decision-making that only women have to do.

Speaking of women, I’m not sure why she’s responded to so different from say, Bill Bryson or David Sedaris, who do the same kinds of introspective pieces but are funnier and a little better at it. When you think about it, Gilbert’s tale of going around the world and getting through a divorce doesn’t involve much more navel gazing than Sedaris telling us about his scarred childhood. They all think they have something special to say, which is what all writers do, really; we think there’s something so profound about our own existences, or something so unique about our abilities to glean profound stories from the people we speak to and the things we observe, that we can provide an insight into the human soul. That’s pretty self-obsessed.

So, sorry Gilbert. I can’t totally back you on this movie deal, especially because I know it makes you rich and there are loads of people writing real books they actually do research for who can’t get paid (Remember when that used to be you?). But I will say that when I also recently left Connecticut, I sifted through my books to decide which ones to take to the library and the paperback copy of yours, which someone totally got me as a gift by mistake because they meant to get me this really cool but similarly-titled book about a day in the life of the human body, did not go into the donation pile.

  • I agree with almost everything you just wrote! Gilbert’s life seems so charmed–and I think that’s part of the reason for the backlash–but she does have a lovely way of describing places and people and food. Her description of the perfect pizza captures the joy of eating it, of living life fully and well .

  • Haven’t read the book and am willing to believe that her treatment of The Exotic Other is kinda crappy, but yeah: “navel-gazing” gets lobbed at every single woman who writes about herself and her life. Which, I mean, if you don’t want to read the book, then don’t, right?

    I’m often frustrated by the way that justifiable class resentment is frequently used, unjustifiably, to just be mean. Poor or rich, everyone has feelings. It’s obnoxious if someone, say, compares their being upset at losing most of the value of their 401K to the plight of Haitian orphans, sure. But simply saying that losing one’s entire retirement savings is stressful and scary and depressing isn’t something we should sneer at.

  • I am sure you have seen this must-read Gilbert post by Bookslut, but just in case…

    http://www.bookslut.com/girl_interrupting/2010_01_015553.php

  • Seth in LA

    A little confused here. You attack Gilbert and then defend her from what? Your own attack? Are you just making an excuse for liking her story and the way she told it. Are your friends so judgemental that you are afraid to admit liking something?

    Having never read a word of Ms. Gilbert’s writing, I can’t tell you if she is the equal of Sedaris or perhaps even his superior. But in answer to your question of why she is treated differently than him, you say that he is funnier. To me that is the whole point of Sedaris. His stuff might be mere self indulgent navel gazing, but he’s funny. Very funny. If you make me laugh, you have done me a service. At that point, I don’t care how self-indulgent the journey was, I’m selfish enough to say, if you made me laugh, it was a journey worth taking.

    If Gilbert is a good enough writer, or funny enough, where she makes you want to take the trip with her, she is excused the navel-gazing. If she isn’t, she doesn’t get the free pass.

    It’s that simple.