Eating and praying, a little bit of loving

I just finished reading Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert.  Part travelogue, part spiritual journey, Gilbert chronicles her year of seeking pleasure in Italy, devotion in India and a balance of both in Indonesia.  I read it in two days, in between eating chocolate and, well, eating chocolate.  The experience was a mixed one.  Although I did enjoy the book, and her smart, witty and best girlfriend voice, sometimes I felt like I was reading a series of essays written by an bright but bubbly straight-A student.  Gilbert's voice is so fast and, well, talkative, it's like she's trying to squeeze a seven-hour phone conversation into one paragraph.  You can tell when she writes that she can talk the branches off a tree that she's probably not lying (I don't think that's a metaphor in the book, but that's what she seems like to me!).  On the other hand, Ms Gilbert writes very honestly, almost too honestly, about her drawn-out divorce, her tendency towards depression and her solo sexual exploits (ie. masturbation).  It was refreshing to hear about these issues in reasonable detail, but I have to admit at times I felt a bit uncomfortable with the amount of information she was sharing.  One of the surprising things about this memoir is that although I agreed with many of the revelations she made in her journey, I didn't find any of them particularly revolutionary. But the most surprising thing I felt about this book was this: although I felt that it was a good rundown of one woman's journey through travel and spiritual enlightenment, I could do better.

Maybe my sense of literacy has gotten better.  Maybe I'm just older and have already discovered many of Gilbert's revelations myself.  The best travelogue/memoir/I've-moved-to-a-European-country-for-love book I've read still remains Always French, by Sarah Turnbull.  That book is light, witty, warm and sensitive to the French way of living and the French man she is living with.   Others, including Eat, Pray, Love, when it comes to the writing style and the voice, fall literarily short.  You'll probably disagree, and fair enough.  Gilbert has won a lot of praise for her book, possibly because of some of the radical terminology she uses in her book (she uses 'God' as her word to refer to an all encompassing spirit, and frequently takes out a notepad to talk to herself/God throughout her year), and probably because of the mass hunger to find a way and means to live one's life and exploit it through a publishing phenomenon.  Gilbert's book is insightful and incredibly empowering for a young woman, and I'm grateful that she's been brave enough to chronicle her struggles as a modern, career orientated, spiritual and independent woman.  I think the book would have been much more interesting had she allowed more of these struggles to come through, rather than focussing on the travelogue nature of the book. I also really liked her delight in wordplay, especially when it came to Italian words.  She has, like Frida Kahlo, by concentrating her experiences and diving in to the collective unconsciousness, made her experiences so personal that they has become universal.

But in terms of the insights and the voice and writing style...I can do better!

On the other hand, I think she's a fantastic speaker - for me personally I find her an engaging and intriguing and I have great admiration for her - check out her speech on creativity and genius for TED.com:

Yay for Elizabeth Gilbert!