by Filmgirl37

Created on: October 06, 2010

Eat, Pray Love?  Nope.  Eat, Prepare, Lose

"Happiness is the result of [great] personal effort"

 Elizabeth Gilbert

Don’t get me wrong.  I definitely admire a celebrity (or a celebrity's relative) who is a willing to let the general public into those very secret recesses of themselves.  And, it certainly seems to me that her choice of style (that is, journalistic as though not only is she releasing a fair amount of vulnerability but we are also privy to those thoughts an feelings that might not otherwise be found unless we were ACTUALLY READING her diary) is fresh and new on the literary scene.  Even more to her credit is the fat that she seems to have wanted to approach the writing of her book not only from the "personal" angle but from the "smart" angle as well.

Throughout the deeply personal accountings of her travels to Italy, India and Indonesia, she inserts some clever trivia such as: Jad is the Hindu word for the American word "inert" and Ham-sa is the Sanskrit phrase for "I am all that" or "I am special."  She also frequently inserts witticisms as though she is Confucius himself saying such things as: "Happiness is the result of [great] personal effort" and "Remember everything you do you do for God and everything God does, He does for you."

At the same time as I can appreciate these proverbs on the sometimes DESPERATE human level that I think she is feeling them, I must also beg the question as to whether she is truly connected enough to a higher power or to the ideas that she is trying to adopt to warrant 'pray' anywhere within her book's title.  "And why is that?" you might be asking yourself ever-so-astutely.  The answer is simple.  Much earlier in the text, she admits to her  reading audience that [she] was not interested in  sharing her opinions on theology she was, rather, interested in "saving her life" and that when she would pray she would address god as though he was someone that he had just met at a cocktail party.  And we all know that it is not usually the case that there is a lot of praying going on at cocktail parties. 

For those epicurean foodies and hedonists out there, there certainly is ample mention of the foods and luxuries available in each of the countries-which would likely be pleasurable to some.  But, prepare  yourself, folks.  Despite its bold format and rarely seen before emotionally cathartic outpouring, Eat, Pray, Love seems to be much more about the process of regaining after loss than it is about 'love' at all and there was not much to "love" about its slow pace and redundant play by play descriptions of each millisecond of her single (and seemingly solitary) life.

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