Eat, Pray, Love

Author: Elizabeth Gilbert

Rating: ⭐ 2/5

Date Read: 2013/04/07

Pages: 334

I wanted to like this. Really. I didn’t expect it to be particularly good, but I love yoga almost as much as I love travelling, and I mostly travel so that I eat as many foreign delicacies as possible, so it sounded up my alley.

People have complained that Gilbert is spoiled and self-centered, which is certainly true. This isn’t a deal breaker for me, though. After all, Proust wrote thousands of semi-autobiographical pages whilst hanging out in his bedroom, and I’m happy enough to read that. I don’t expect writers to be people I’d like to be friends with: most of the time, the crazy and unstable ones are the most interesting.

My issue with Gilbert is that she’s not particularly insightful. Reading Eat, Pray, Love was an experience akin to eavesdropping on someone else’s conversation while riding the subway: “Oh my God, and like, in Italy, the food was sooooooo good. I had, like, such good pizza. And yoga, is like, so enlightening, and like so spiritual. And I totally always knew I’d go back to Indonesia. It was so life-changing and stuff.”