Eat, Pray, Read Something Else

Good riddance to Eat, Pray, Love, one of the more wretched, grating and boring books I've read lately.

I made it about halfway through before I finally resigned myself to the fact it was not going to get any better. (I always hope books will get better, and they never do.)

The first third (the Eat chapter) is abysmally long and repetitive. She spends 100+ pages saying she had a crappy marriage, a difficult divorce and that she loves, loves, loves the Italian language and Italian food. Now press repeat and you've got the first chapter. She reveals nothing so personal about her marriage, divorce or love of all things Italian as to warrant 100 pages on all this, so let's move on, Liz.

When I told my friend Ann in desperation I couldn't handle it anymore, she told me to press on, that the next chapter "Pray," which finds her finally out of Italy and in an ashram in India, is better.

I'd agree. It is better. But that ain't saying much. She spends the Pray chapter whining about how she's no good at meditating and quoting a caricature of a Texan who's only interest seems to be giving her pithy advice. Somehow I doubt how conveniently this person always says the perfect, trivial thing.

I feel like the Texan, and everyone else she meets, deserves better than her egocentric descriptions of them. I feel readers of this book deserve better.

The final straw for me was finding her - for the billionth time - on a bathroom floor crying about an ex-boyfriend. For Christ's sake Elizabeth Gilbert, pull it together! I know... you're depressed... you've mentioned it about 900 times already!... but good god, you should be crying about the fact that you're clearly missing an editor, not a boyfriend.

Many people loved this book. Loooooved it. I've read endless glowing reviews. But trust me when I say that it's like reading a self-help book written by a stunningly self-absorbed 14-year-old. There's no way I could finish traveling with her through India, let alone visit Indonesia with her. She's annoying, egotistical and self-agrandizing (monks tell me I'm lucky, and they're right!) and her writing is wholly unremarkable.

She is the woman I would run screaming to get away from at a party. The attraction to this book reminds me of people's bewildering attraction to the Grey's Anatomy character Meredith Grey. There is absolutely nothing likable about the Grey's character - she's constantly whining, unable to make decisions and looks for answers from everyone else - and yet people love it. It's just like Eat, Pray, Love. Elizabeth Gilbert is Meredith Grey in real life. Completely and utterly uninteresting and exasperating.

I did skim to the end of Eat, Pray, Love and it ended just as predictably as you'd expect from a chapter titled "Love." No surprises here. The only interesting part is that she nearly gets fleeced by a Balinese woman.

But mostly it's more of the same, Gilbert attempting to make a non-story a story. Everything fits so perfectly into the thesis - In this book I will eat, pray and love - that nothing else happens. There is nothing to propel the story forward because there is no story. How anyone ever read the whole thing is beyond me.

After the last two lackluster books I've read, I'm on to read Lolita, which Jen counts as one her favorites.

Here we go, Nabokov, here we go! (Clap, clap.)