Maria read and liked Emily Kramer's review of Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia:

"Don't listen to Opera or the millions of straight haired ladies nodding their heads to the tune of spiritual renewal. The reason this book resonated for millions of American women is because it's actually about sex. Alternate title: No Sex, No Sex,...more Don't listen to Opera or the millions of straight haired ladies nodding their heads to the tune of spiritual renewal. The reason this book resonated for millions of American women is because it's actually about sex. Alternate title: No Sex, No Sex, Sex - a tale of eight months of pain and three months of pleasure. It tells us what every woman wants to hear: good sex is at most, 1 year and a million miles within your reach.

The real story here is one of a woman who hadn't been properly laid in a long time and so when someone gives her (and yes, you can GIVE an orgasm) four orgasms in a day and doesn't care if she doesn't shave her legs in exchange, she falls in head over heels, even if he is a 51 year old man with an ex wife and three kids who lives across the ocean. Then again, maybe it was all her intense yoga that made her open to love. It's possible.

Typical skepticism about over popular books on the topic of self improvement made me shy away from this one from the start. I consulted Jessica, goddess of book reviews, before taking it up to the register: Jessica, i txted, is it ok that i buy Eat Pray Love for my plane ride? Jessie said she hadn't read it, which should have been an immediate sign to put the thing back on it's shelf but also, it was too late. I was already in the window seat, feet up against the wall between me and first class, skimming away.

After Lizzy confides that she's not going to dish about the fallout of her marriage, aside from admitting that a big suburban house and a kid might just not fulfill her after all, she goes on with a few ragged details of a bad relationship gone worse held close due to glimmers of intimacy through a view otherwise blocked by the sheen of tears.

I read real quick through the next part about Rome, because as I suspected, she turns down all opportunities to do "it" when she's there - choosing to remain platonic with her dark and stormy Italian language partner and maintain her vow of celibacy. I flip through India, most entertained by bits and
pieces of conversations with her reformed texan cowboy who talks a little like Sawyer from Lost and gives her nicknames like "groceries" and otherwise tells her like it is. Unfortunately, this man is only a spiritual partner; an easy American there to guide her through the ways of the Ashram.

Of course Bali is the part I pay the most attention to because I've already peeked at the end and know that there's a lot of pages with "he" on them, and not the capital H like the god i'm supposed to be learning to get in touch with as I read. The he is of course another dark but calm before the storm sort of man who is totally happy to give her the world and expect nothing in return. What a let down. This woman has in fact become so self fulfilled that just when she
needs nothing she gets it all. Well, goody for her.

If Liz thinks that wandering around the streets of Berlin talking to myself (repeat after me - you are your own guide. your love for yourself with get you through all this) is going to do the trick she's wrong there. This is just the sort of self indulgence that got me into this mess in the first place! If I wanted self-actualization I would have gone with Barack's Audacity of Hope. Emily is "now
accepting recommendations on travel guides having nothing to do with self-realization or books on understanding the collapse of the financial world and how it will effect ME for the trip back home."(less) "

Maria read and liked (0v0)'s review of Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia:

"What I'm about to say must be wrong, because I couldn't get through this book. I tried. And I failed. So: I have NO BUSINESS WRITING THIS. Don't read it.

A cousin recommended EPL and I thought it would teach me something about the book mar...more What I'm about to say must be wrong, because I couldn't get through this book. I tried. And I failed. So: I have NO BUSINESS WRITING THIS. Don't read it.

A cousin recommended EPL and I thought it would teach me something about the book market. My secret boyfriend at the public library was horrified I checked it out, given his ACLU-offensive intimacy with my record and tastes; and yes, like others, I was embarrassed to have EPL in my possession.

Because:

What IS this MOVEMENT of lily-white bourgeois women with fancy educations working themselves into identity crises that they think can be solved by a new form of coloniasm? This hyper-feminized adventure travel?

Subaltern poaching for the 21st century. Taker mentality as spiritual quest.

These people need their own version of Outside magazine or some shit. Oh yeah, they already do. It's called the GAIAM catalog.

Yeah. We're talking some serious dilettante tourism: taking entire countries as theme spas. Italy for excess, India for asceticism, Indonesia for the middle path.

Ladies: Country I is not your personal terrain for self-discovery. You don't get to interiorize Country I as a metaphor for your personal potential. If your interior journey needs a bunch of leisure time and poor countries to be realized, maybe you're asking the wrong questions.

The consumerist mentality was so self-important and so priveleged that I just couldn't make myself give this book any more time.(less) "

Maria read and liked Fiona's review of Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia:

"This is the review I put on my blog - it's basically a rant about how this bokk made me ashamed to be a woman.

Eat Play Love is the monologue of a neurotic american princess ("Liz") in her mid thirties. The first few chapters bac...more This is the review I put on my blog - it's basically a rant about how this bokk made me ashamed to be a woman.

Eat Play Love is the monologue of a neurotic american princess ("Liz") in her mid thirties. The first few chapters background the rest of the book, a confessional that tells how she came to find her 8 year marriage distasteful, realised she wasn't keen on the next 'logical' step which is apparently to fill her expansive apartment with children, and plunges into an impotent depression. Without even getting drunk!

Anyway, one night, whilst bawling on the bathroom floor, a habit she has grown fond of, she is struck by a flakey attack of twattery. Being an American, this experience manifests itself as finding some kind of God, or something like that. So naturally she resolves to leave her husband. Her husband isn't keen on this development, and, she finds that, strangely, he takes poorly to having his heart shattered into a million pieces.

Husband behaves badly, and she feels hurt and sad. But, no matter because soon she hooks up with the sexy, exciting yoga chanting David, who takes a five minute break from his headlong charge toward pattern baldness, floaty Thai fisherman's pants and a thin ponytail, to rattle her well-bred bones. Liz drinks deeply from lusts' stagnant well!

But, the divorce negotiations ensue, leaving Liz, once again, bawling on the bathroom floor. But this time it's David's bathroom floor. David seems unimpressed by such displays. It seems men are interested in women for their unique and interesting qualities, and unless you are Bob Dylan, melancholy gets old, fast. (Incidentally, if you find a chap who likes this constant emo-drama, then run. Anyone who wants to be needed that badly is a fruitcake and probably wears his mother's underwear).

Here's what really bothers me about this book. Eat Pray Love is a New York Times bestseller. It was recommended to me by a friend, a woman, who is a successful publisher in her own right. According to her, this is the best book she has read this year. It's been a short year.

Here's what really bothers me about this book. Eat Pray Love is a New York Times bestseller. It was recommended to me by a friend, a woman, who is a successful publisher in her own right. According to her, this is the best book she has read this year. It's been a short year.

Now granted, she is an American, but she isn't given to fawning excesses that one might expect from anyone who doesn't think this book should have been printed on softer paper (I think 3 ply would about do it). So I was surprised.

I am told, you see, that women 'get' this book. Which means they sympathise and understand it. I bet its on Oprah's Fucking Book List.

So, when I am invited to speak about this book on Oprah's Fucking Book club, here is what I will say:

[feminist rant:]

Women! You will get to the end of this book and still be under the illusion that it is not your responsibility to make yourself happy. Repeat: it is, in fact, your own responsibility to make yourself happy. Being happy without being with a man does not trivialise love. You should find challenges, entertainment, fun, excitement, passion, the thrill of mastery and satisfaction of achievement through your own doings, not who you are doing. Love might enhance this. It cannot substitute this.

Can you imagine if men felt so "incomplete" without women? When did is become acceptable for men to be our projects? When did it become acceptable for women to be defined by "their" men?, as if something less than this arrangement denigrates the sanctity of "a relationship". Fuck - until I read this book I thought I'd dealt feminism a crippling blow by jack-knifing the trailer this morning. I look like Susan fricking Sontag in gumboots compared to this book.

In this book, the author's only explanation for her pathetic simpering twattery is that she is "as affectionate as a cross between a Golden Retriever and a barnacle". This is supposed to tell us why her sex life resembles pollen in a strong breeze.

To her, and all other Oprah book clubbers who 'get' this book: get a Golden Retriever. Or barnacles. Or maybe a Golden Retriever with barnacles (how appreciative would he be at grooming time??!)

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