The problem is that many believe the fairy tales

Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia happily has not ever occupied any of my time. I was aware of it coming out and its being tagged as priv lit but other than that, very few neurons turned towards it. I see it a lot in used bookstores but have never felt called to take it home.

I understand now why. Recently a colleague recommended that I listen to the author, Elizabeth Gilbert, in a TED talk on Your Elusive Creative Genius. Twenty minutes not particularly well spent but it certainly crystallizes my aversion.

To start with, I read the book blurb:

Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love touched the world and changed countless lives, inspiring and empowering millions of readers to search for their own best selves. Now, this beloved and iconic book returns in a beautiful 10th anniversary edition, complete with an updated introduction from the author, to launch a whole new generation of fans.

In her early thirties, Elizabeth Gilbert had everything a modern American woman was supposed to want—husband, country home, successful career—but instead of feeling happy and fulfilled, she was consumed by panic and confusion. This wise and rapturous book is the story of how she left behind all these outward marks of success, and set out to explore three different aspects of her nature, against the backdrop of three different cultures: pleasure in Italy, devotion in India, and on the Indonesian island of Bali, a balance between worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence.

I can see why my instincts led me away from this particular book and I now begin to understand the specifics of the pejorative description assigned to it as priv lit.

Here is a description of priv lit from Eat, Pray, Spend: Priv-Lit and the New, Enlightened American Dream by Joshunda Sanders.

But Eat, Pray, Love and its positioning as an Everywoman's guide to whole, empowered living embody a literature of privilege and typify the genre's destructive cacophony of insecurity, spending, and false wellness. Let Them Eat Kale Eat, Pray, Love is not the first book of its kind, but it is a perfect example of the genre of priv-lit: literature or media whose expressed goal is one of spiritual, existential, or philosophical enlightenment contingent upon women's hard work, commitment, and patience, but whose actual barriers to entry are primarily financial.

More succinctly, Sanders characterizes it as Wealthy, Whiny, and White. Other reviews include The Expensive, Unattainable Lie that is Eat Pray Love by Martha Ross and Eat, Pray, Merch: You Can Buy Happiness, After All by Disgrasian. The latter focuses on the rampant consumerism related to the Eat, Pray Love movie.

Eat, Pray, Love has a soundtrack, a home furnishings line, a clothing line, a jewelry line, a tour package that follows author Elizabeth Gilbert’s itinerary across Italy, India, and Indonesia, a fragrance, a tea, and, for its piece de marketing resistance, an unprecedented three-day selling orgy on the Home Shopping Network, beginning Aug. 6, a week before the movie opens, of “more than 400 items across a variety of categories, including beauty, electronics, home decor, travel, cooking, jewelry, accessories, and ready-to-wear,” including, as Variety reported this week, a line of lip glosses from Lancome, for whom Julia Roberts, star of the movie, is a spokesperson.

The question is, will the book and movie’s targeted demo fall (eat)prey(love) to this? Gilbert’s bestselling memoir is ostensibly about spiritual enlightenment, and this merch run-up to the movie version’s release could be perceived as its opposite, an orgasm of tie-ins, of products designed to make a woman of a certain age feel young, beautiful, adventurous, exotic—at least for the few minutes following her ripping-open of the product packaging—a marketing strategy that’s almost comically venal, the brainchild of some licensing whiz who knows well and good that women buy shit to feel happy and why make bones about it. You can’t read about the movie’s three-day HSN tie-in, for example, without stumbling across the same fact over and over, that HSN estimates its demo is “83 percent female between the ages of 30-50 years old with an above average income.” There isn’t even any foreplay to this Eat, Pray, Lovemaking, it’s all just: You know you want it. Bam.

The TED talk was suggested to me as an example of effective presentation. And, in many ways, it is. If you are willing to suspend disbelief, indeed, if you are willing to suspend sentient thought, you can enjoy 20 minutes of a narrative arc. An attractive storyteller spinning a narrative that is easy to listen to. It is humorous, entertaining, attractive.

But it doesn't take too much thinking to begin to see the issues that the reviewers highlighted: Self-indulgence, Self-orientation, Self-complimenting, Mystical nonsense, Name dropping, Mountains-out-of-molehills drama making, Faux challenges, Attention seeking, Narcissistic consumerism, Callowness, Seeking sympathy for success, etc. Now I understand the accusations of priv lit. This is privileged self-indulgence on steroids, devoid of seriousness and divorced from reality.

I congratulate Gilbert on her success; I would not wish otherwise. But I understand now my instinctive aversion. If anyone derives inspiration from this, wonderful. I do not.

My only residual concern is that this fairy tale self-delusion is manifested in many corners of our culture - in media, entertainment, pundits, universities, policy makers. Its nice to have fairy tales but lord protect us from such believers.

UPDATE: From Althouse on July 2, 2016, Eat Pray Love... pick 2 following Gilbert's announcement that "I am separating from the man whom many of you know as 'Felipe' — the man whom I fell in love with at the end of the EAT PRAY LOVE journey." Presumably on the basis that a personal tragedy from someone who made her name based on over-communication cannot be private and therefore permits commenting, Althouse's commenters have a fun time commenting.

Mary Beth said...
That book taught me self-control. I never read it, but I eventually managed to not roll my eyes anytime it was mentioned. I consider that a personal victory.