Religion & Beliefs
Eat Pray Backlash?
By Izzy Grinspan / February 7, 2008
Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love has been endorsed by Oprah and become the second-bestselling book of 2007, so of course it was due for a backlash. USA Today reports a growing trend of disdain for Gilbert’s easy spiritual epiphanies, suggesting that people resent her depiction of India and Indonesia as shortcuts to inner peace.
The New York Post started the anti-trend with a teardown of the piece back in December that called the book
the worst in Western fetishization of Eastern thought and culture, assured in its answers to existential dilemmas that have confounded intellects greater than hers. You may be a well-off white woman, but if you are depressed, the answer can be found in the East, where the poor brown people are sages.
At Old Hag, blogger Lizzie Skurnick put it more succinctly: “Nothing is more boring than your epiphanies.”
Gilbert has responded to the criticism, saying that she gets that her book smacks of “loosey-goosey spiritual seeking” that’s “just a free-for-all of well-heeled Westerners randomly shoplifting rituals and symbols from all the world's more exotic religions” but adding that she’s just trying to understand her relationship with the divine. (Which sort of brings us back to the “boring” accusation, doesn’t it?)
I haven’t read the book – last time I was at the airport I went with The Audacity of Hope instead – but I’m told that the sections on prayer seem really foreign if you come at them from a Jewish perspective. Then again, Gilbert’s not exactly looking for a Jewish epiphany, or she would have gone to a different country starting with the letter “I.”
Also in Jewcy: The JewBu's Guide to Eat, Pray, Love
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Personal story: I'm a 42 year old single, kind of free-spirited to a
fault, kind of gal who was inspired by Gilbert's story and
spontaneously up and went to Bali for a couple of weeks to do some yoga
and hang out for a few weeks this past December. I had a magical,
wonderful trip, and sychronistically *met* Ketut and Wayan in like
"real life" (!) when I was in Ubud — I'll admit, it was a total
surprise, but super fun, nonetheless. So when I come home to MN, some
casual acquaintances (all women, about my age, married with kids, etc.)
ask why I'm tan, and I tell them I've just returned from Bali. And they
tell me they have read the book — So I share that I met these
characters in real life from the book and it was totally cool
experience. But here's the STUMPER: They all start going OFF about
how "selfish" she is, how pissed off parts of the book made them feel.
And it's like they're venting all this pent up anger getting all MAD AT ME!!! Like I unleashed this total rage, "whoah!!" This has happened now several times,
leading me to wonder just how many people who are married with kids are
really happy underneath the surface. They seem really smug (but
seething) as they declare "they could never do anything like that."
Well, shyyte! Here I thought "poor me, and here I was secretly envious of their more conventional life" (in Minneapolis I'm the exception, not the rule 'round these parts anyway…) Wowza,
all I have to say is I wasn't at all prepared for angry responses to
telling them I went on this crazy trip and met these characters! If
someone had told me that I would be like, "Cool!"
So tonight I googled "Eat Pray Love Backlash" and
found this discussion! And YEP! Here are more pissed off women!!
Confirming my little 'ol theory about this pent up anger…. Makes me
wonder how much we're all hiding from each other about the way it
really is…. How much pretending goes on.
I have been to Italy and India and had many similar expieriences and feelings. I felt like I was reading a book about myself.(I even hugged trees in High school here in the USA). Maybe I should get my tickets to Bali?? Oh gee, I'm happily married, guess I better bring my husband along…. I wish I had written the book and would I say no to Julia Roberts portrayiong me?? I don't think so…
PS If you want a really in depth, funny true and amazing memoir of Spiritual seeking read HOLY COW by Sarah Macdonald
Hi Cavanaugh!
You said:
"I'm interested in why this happens so often. In some cases, it seems
that unfamiliar surroundings and cultural contexts simply make us more
susceptible to transient peak experiences. In other cases, they may
lend themselves to lasting personal growth. I'm interested in figuring
out what makes the latter happen as opposed to the former, and why the
unfamiliar surroundings and cultural contexts are so often looked to as
a sort of prerequisite for personal growth. After all, not everyone has
someone willing to invest money into their spiritual journey on the off
chance that a best-seller will result."
I think it has a lot do with distance from your own rat race. Simple as that. My 2008 has been horrible. I ended 2007 and began 2008 with a nasty flu bug that persisted for 3 1/2 weeks. Two days after I had recovered and started to feel like I was getting back into the swing of things, I was injured in an accident; another (going on) 5 weeks of recovery. I was feeling sad, run down, dejected, hopeless…you name it.
My sister called with an opportunity for me to spend last weekend in Frisco. Although it meant hobbling around on a cane, I jumped at the chance to get away.
I came back from that weekend away from my life with renewed hope and vigor! All weekend long I bathed my psyche in every smell, taste, experience I had; reveling in things I had never seen. Reminding myself to enjoy it and stow away that feeling so I could recapture it.
This was only a weekend of course, and to San Francisco to boot (so no foreign exotic locale) but it meant I didn't have to think about my job, my bills, my basement mold, my leaky foundation, etc; all the things that make up ones modern existence. I only had to think about me, what I needed and what I wanted out of life…or at least the weekend.
Being somewhere different, especially somewhere with seemingly unlimited beauty and opportunity for learning (and therefore growing), can inspire one, who is so inclined, to open up and really get to know themselves.
Sometimes it results in an epiphany. Sometimes it results in a book. Sometimes it fades sooner than you meant it to.
a.
I got it, and loved it, I don't have to agree with her obvious political affiliations…..
I am a White Conservative Christian
I have read this book and I have to admit I was somewhat disappointed. She is a very good writer, but she doesn't cover any new ground. She was paid to take a year traveling the world so she could come back and write about her spiritual journey seeking the Divine (nice work if you can get it). My one regret with reading this book is, in a very small way, I've helped further its success by buying a copy. Perhaps I can sell my copy and it will find it's way to someone who desperately needs this type of insight.
At least one critic observed that if Ms. Gilbert had been a man, and written the exact same work with the genders reversed for various key characters in the story, it would not have been as well received. No way of knowing if that is really true unless some brave (or silly) soul actually performs the acid test and writes such a book, but I believe the observation to be suspiciously accurate.
Furthermore, she spent a year looking for the very answer she found in the first few pages telling the reader about her emotional and spiritual crisis in the bathroom thinking about her marriage, and her inner voice told her to go back to bed. She'd already found what she then spent a year "looking" for.
In other words from a by-gone era, "…if I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own back yard. Because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with! Is that right?" ~ Dorothy Gale
God bless you Nikki! So very well put.:-)
Anyone who HAD read "Eat Pray Love" would know Gilbert was a student of
said "foreign mysteries" long before embarking on her journey (which
you would also know was paid for by the an investment in the resulting
publication). It's my opinion that she engaged mindfully, with a pretty
savvy awareness the limitations of her own cultural context, in a
journey to salvage herself and create something in the process.
That's great.
But to Cavanaugh
and Ms. Greenspan, what you are discussing is yourselves, not the
author or the book.
I was actually trying to discuss an aspect of my own culture, and its relationship to a genre of book into which Eat, Pray, Love appears, on its face, to fit–that of the spiritual journey marked by finding spirituality in contrasts and unfamiliarity. If it was not so for the author in her experience, the success of the book certainly rests on exactly that appeal for the readers.
I'm interested in why this happens so often. In some cases, it seems that unfamiliar surroundings and cultural contexts simply make us more susceptible to transient peak experiences. In other cases, they may lend themselves to lasting personal growth. I'm interested in figuring out what makes the latter happen as opposed to the former, and why the unfamiliar surroundings and cultural contexts are so often looked to as a sort of prerequisite for personal growth. After all, not everyone has someone willing to invest money into their spiritual journey on the off chance that a best-seller will result.
The point of the whole exercise by this woman was to question her life, her self and to find her road to happiness and spiritual fulfillment. Self-obsession is somewhat necessary – don't you think? The manner in which she does it is her own and the results will also be her own. No two human experiences or outcomes are the same, and if it worked for her – more power to her.
The fact that she decided to share it with the world was, I assume, to either share her experience with others so that they, too, could decide if a similar experience might work for them or……… to make a lot of money – either way she does open herself to criticism and ridicule, and we will oblige her, as that is the type of society we are. You can't please all of the people all of the time.
Now, if she gives all the proceeds from the book to charities, I might believe that she has found her true self, the meaning of life and spritual fulfillment.
If not, then she has but one retort to all her critics – "Gotcha!"
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