Eat, Pray, Love and how to love/hate it

You know, I actually like the book, Eat Pray Love. I read it the first time when I just happened to be at the beginning of my divorce. What better way to perk myself up then to read about another woman who went through the same thing and apparently discovered herself?

The book itself is, in fact, a memoir, so yeah, it's going to be self-indulgent, selfish, self-centered, all about the SELF. I knew this going into it. It made me realize that sometimes, it really is about just being yourself.

Because I liked the book--and had read it a couple more times after that first time--I looked forward to the movie. I was afraid that my expectations were too high, because the book spoke to me.

There really are times when I really hate it that I'm right.

I couldn't quite put my finger on what bothered me about the movie itself. Yeah, they changed some parts of it; it didn't really happen that way. If you take the movie as it stands, however, can it, well, stand on its own two feet?

Like I said, I couldn't quite figure out what bothered me until I read this article about it. At first I figured I'd just read it and get mildly irritated at the fact that many men really just don't understand how the female mind works. Maybe this guy does, maybe he doesn't, but he makes some valid points about the whole deal.

For one thing, it is indeed about a rich white woman who is so unhappy that she runs away. While I'm inclined to say that at least she's running to something, I'm also honor-bound to admit that yeah, most women--most people--have bigger issues to deal with. There are families all over the world that can't even feed themselves, let alone think about the fact that their spouse either hates them or is cheating on them. And the movie doesn't even attempt to explain what exactly it is that she can't quite deal with. Probably only those who've read the book will get that it's not just the marriage, not just the husband--it's where she wants to be.

At the beginning of the movie--and the book too, I think--Gilbert says something about a psychiatrist friend of hers who is asked to help some Cambodian refugees who have lived through what truly is some harrowing, soul-breaking experiences. The psychiatrist feels underqualified to talk to them--how can she relate? Gilbert says that the refugees ended up surprising her. They wanted to talk about their love lives.

Yeah, ok, I admit that most American women and girls have a very unhealthy obsession with the so-called "man" in their lives. We have an annoying tendency to talk about him, dream about him, wonder where he is, what he's doing, and we always want to know why he's not here with us, being the center of our pathetic little universes.

I know this because it's probably the very reason behind the failure of my own marriage.

American women, we have not only those tendencies: we have addictions. Drug addictions. It's why Juliet killed herself when she found Romeo "dead", why Bella Swan chooses Edward--a freaking vampire, for crying out loud, I don't care how "vegetarian" and sparkly he is--and why Gilbert finally realizes that she really is either loving a guy or breaking up with a guy.

That being said, addictions also have a very strong habit: they change everything about you. You become so focused on your next fix that you forget everything else. Food becomes habitual if you need it at all. Friends and family fall by the wayside, watching you turn yourself inside out for the love of this one person. Life becomes all about the drug of your choice, the man--or fucking vamp--you've so unwisely fallen for, to give you the thrill that runs in your veins and makes your heart pound faster.

Guys, come on, give us a little break. We can't really help it, we can't help what we become until you break us--heart, body, soul--and we start to figure out that we did indeed give up everything for you. And that's if we're lucky; too many of us just use the next guy who comes along to both heal us and give us the next fix. Almost like a vampire, ironically, who sucks your blood yet apparently has some sort of venom that will heal the bite.

I'm not a guy, so I don't know how it is for them. But I do know that this addiction thing grabs you buy the throat, burns you until you try to quench the thirst. Can you really blame Gilbert for, at first, ignoring the signs, then slowly coming to face it within herself, then run away screaming bloody divorce? Yeah, you can, but only because you haven't lost everything--yeah, everything--that makes you you.

Gilbert says that as a couple, she and her husband went out and bought appliances on credit, had a nice house in suburbia, a dog--that stupid American dream that we all are force-fed and only some of us try to vomit it back up. The kicker? She never wanted to be that couple. She perhaps didn't know that she would become it, going into what she thought was going to be the happily-ever-after-for-the-rest-of-her-godforsaken-life. But that's not the point, is it?

The point is this: Eat Pray Love does indeed give hope to many American women--yes, many of them middle-aged who want to be just that "courageous", and there is a reason behind it that has nothing to do with Oprah and everything to do with sheer unhappiness. But it must also be said that both the book and the movie are so fucking Americanized that it feeds us both desperate hope ... and utter bullshit.

Sometimes it's just hard to argue with the truth.