New contributor Sofia Farelli reviews the book version of Eat, Pray, Love.
I’m not normally one for archetypal ‘chick-lit’ as often the stories don’t appeal to me but I also bitterly resent that term. A good story is a good story in my eyes. And I’ll remind you that Harry Potter is a CHILDREN’S story if we’re going to get in to it.
Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, came to my attention in an interview in one of the Sunday papers. I thought she seemed a very smart lady, very warm and it piqued my interest in her book that I had previously shunned. In spite of how much I love Julia Roberts. Perhaps I’d been too hasty in dismissing her story of a journey – literally, geographically, I will not be using that word to reference any form of emotion – across the world after hitting deep depression during and after the breakdown of her marriage. ‘One Woman’s Search for Everything’ – I thought this story actually had the potential to have a lot of heart.
How wrong one person can be. I always like to read the book before the movie if I can so I tried; I made it 127 pages out of a tear inducing 346. I barely dented the Pray section. I attempted the movie after seeing it was on Netflix, I genuinely made it about eleven minutes.
This is one woman’s supposedly true account of a vulnerable time in her life and I respect that but it’s hard to remain sympathetic when all you want to do is scream ‘FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS MUCH, LIZ?’
It’s an incredibly frustrating and at times unbearable story full of privilege and is an incredible testament to our Western world, where we’re all guilty of forgetting how lucky we are and we invent problems. Our parents laugh at us and rightly so because we’re a weak generation who wouldn’t know hard times if it came and snatched away our Macs in Starbucks. People in Rwanda don’t worry about the central themes in this book for example because they’ve got real shit to deal with.
I will give you the exact moment when I finally stopped and decided this story was no longer worth my time. It will sound trivial but this is the moment I realised I couldn’t care less about the protagonist or anything that happens to her. I made it through the Eat section and now she was on her way to an Ashram to Pray.
“My plane lands in Mumbai around 1.30 AM. It is December 30. I find my luggage, then find the taxi that will take me hours and hours out of the city to the Ashram, located in a remote rural village… we pull up to the front of the gate of the Ashram at 3.30 AM…”
Hours and hours? She meant two hours. Including getting her luggage and getting to the taxi out of Mumbai airport, so what, an hour and a half? This is the moment – the metaphorical straw that broke the camel’s back – I could stand all the wanky talk about Italians and food but this? No. No more.
If you hate yourself, read this book. If not I’d maybe skip it. I maintain a sense of respect for the author after that great interview but would happily forget I ever attempted to get in to this book.
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