On Eating and Praying and Loving
Essays, Featured, Film — By Sarah Thebarge on August 20, 2010 at 8:00 am
In the early twentieth century, Sigmund Freud became famous for asking the question, “What does a woman want?” He concluded the problem with women was they were hysterical, and what they wanted most was to be manually stimulated to orgasm. It was an innovative solution to women’s quandaries, but in the end, not that helpful.
But I pity Freud in this, because how is a man supposed to discern what a woman wants if a woman doesn’t even know what a woman wants? It seems we have yet to crack the code, though many have tried.
Suffragettes asserted women wanted the right to vote, and the right to own property. Feminists insisted women wanted sexual freedom, education, birth control and financial independence.
Today this question is answered for most women by fashion labels and marketing firms. Women want Kate Spade handbags, Jimmy Choo heels, no-fault divorces, fluorescent cocktails and guilt-free comfort food. Oh, and a sexy, sensitive, wealthy, ambitious man who adores them.
Many women spend their lives pursuing these things, only to find that they either already have them, can’t ever have them, or don’t want them anymore.
Enter Elizabeth “Liz” Gilbert, the author who wrote the New York Times best-seller Eat, Pray, Love, which was recently adapted into a movie starring Julia Roberts. After realizing she felt trapped in her marriage and the life she’d worked so hard to build with her husband, she filed for a divorce and set out on a journey to find herself again. She spent a year traveling the world, spending time in Italy, India and Indonesia. And then she wrote a book about the physical, spiritual and emotional transformation she experienced during that year.
If Freud asked the question, “What does a woman want,” Gilbert poses the question, “What does a woman need?” Beyond her political rights, societal position and external possessions, what makes a woman feel intrinsically content?
When a friend gave me the book a few years ago, I almost didn’t read it because of the title. Eat, Pray, Love sounded too much like the shampoo instructions, “Lather. Rinse. Repeat.” Like a formula to perpetuate the silliness of women more concerned with the shininess of the hair on their head than the brain underneath it all.
I was also wary of it because it listed the very things women struggle with most. There’s eating, with its associated anorexia, obesity, and all the fad diets in between.
Then there’s praying, which is hard to find time for when you’re working and cooking and cleaning and burying dead pets in the back yard before the kids wake up to find that Rowdy is….well…not so rowdy any more. Busyness aside, it’s even harder to pray when you think of approaching a masculine authority figure who reminds you of the trauma you’ve spent your whole life trying to forget.
And then there’s love, which is warped into abandonment, codependence, and hyper-sexuality.
All of this scrutiny, and I hadn’t even gotten past the cover. But it was the cover that made me read the book, because I realized that whoever wrote this must be familiar enough with women’s issues to be able to tap into them with three monosyllabic words. And if she understood the difficulty, maybe she could provide a solution.
Gilbert begins her quest by deciding the right questions to ask – which turn out to be, “Who is God, and how do I find Him/Her?” and “Who am I, and how do I find me?” Her attempt to find an answer involves having a fling with a younger man in New York, then breaking up with him to fly to Italy, where she spends her days washing heaping plates of pasta down with endless bottles of wine.
Thus fortified with carbohydrates and alcohol, she travels to India to learn meditation and contemplation – after which she concludes that, “God dwells within you, as you.” And with this confusing mantra, she travels to Bali, where learning how to love involves palm readings with an ancient medicine man, and having a tryst with a wealthy businessman.
And somehow after a year of this, she concludes that she has found God and herself. Or maybe God as herself. Or God in herself. It’s a little unclear. Anyway. If Gilbert’s book is viewed as a retelling of one woman’s journey, it is an outlandish (seriously, who gets a year of paid time off to travel the world?) but fascinating adventure. The movie adaptation is relatively true to the book, brought to life with respectable acting and breathtaking scenery.
But the frenzy it has created makes me think most women view it as more than someone else’s story. Most women view themselves as Gilbert – stuck in the rut of meaningless routines, loveless relationships, and thankless jobs, aching to break free of these constraints and reconnect with themselves while jet setting around the world.
For many women, the title is a recipe for a magic potion that transforms your life from ordinary to extraordinary. And if applied as a formula for finding true happiness and identity, it becomes problematic.
First of all, you have to leave the relationship you’ve committed yourself to. And then you have to convince your boss that you deserve a year off. And then you have to swing a ticket to Bali. And then you have to find meaning in sleeping with random men as you travel around the world, discovering that God is a permissive, polytheistic conglomeration.
Eat, Pray, Love resonates with women because it describes how most women feel or have felt about their lives. It asks a remarkable question- What do women need? And it narrates Gilbert’s process to arrive at an answer.
The problem is, Gilbert’s process belies her answer. Women don’t need to get a divorce or have a tryst or travel the world to break free of what constrains them. Women don’t need to find themselves in a bottle of wine or a first class ticket or a man’s bed. Isn’t this the problem, after all? Don’t most women fail to find themselves because they’re always looking for themselves in something – whether it’s motherhood or a pair of stilettos or an umpteen-karat diamond ring?
What women need is not to find themselves in a thing or in another human being. It’s to find themselves. Period. Or, to borrow Gilbert’s phrase, it’s to find themselves, as themselves.
14 Comments
Beautiful. Even without a mention of that hot Javier what-his-name guy.
Love it, Sarah, especially the conclusion. Beautifully written.
Sarah:
David Hayward has a great idea on Eat-Pray-Love with his drawing at:
http://www.nakedpastor.com/archives/5998
Dave
I read the book a little over a year ago. I’m confused by the phenomenon the brand (book/movie) has become with women. I only perceive the book in two specific ways:
1 – It was an interesting adventure
2 – It was fun to see Gilbert learning some things about herself as a single person for the first time in ages (mostly because she seemed earnest about her dependency-type issues).
I never took a grander scale point from it. EPL as some sort of formula for women is strange to me. I don’t know how someone could read it and glean it from the text.
I’d never read Gilbert prior to EPL so afterward I looked around the net. There’s much out there about women who’d tried to replicate her experience in some way…and it was so sad. Gilbert’s even talked about how that wasn’t the point of the book.
I’m not a woman so maybe it is difficult to relate. I just thought it was an above average tale of self-discovery.
I haven’t seen the movie or read the book, but your review makes me feel like Eat, Pray, Love is a modern Ecclesiastes but with contrary conclusions.
Great insight, Sarah! I haven’t read the book or seen the movie yet, but my sense is that her story isn’t new and it isn’t even gender specific. There’s another popular three-word-titled travelogue that’s set to (finally) become a movie with a star-studded cast: Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.” Kerouac, fictionalized as Sal Paradise, touches on eating (lots of apple pie at roadside cafes), praying (his Catholic faith is evident; other books show his interest in Buddhism and then return to Catholicism), and loving (there are some romances, and there is a love for friends) all while traveling across the US and into Mexico. And in the Victorian era, there was another woman traveler, Isabella Bird, who left her country, England, to travel, on horseback no less, to the US, Korea, and Tibet. Along the way, she too talks about food, God, and love (for a guy named Mountain Man Jim in Colorado). I think traveling allows us that rare opportunity to encounter ourselves, to discover who we really are when we’re not within the comfort and familiarity of friends, family, and our fast-paced lives. We’re all searching for something deeper, more meaningful, and I suppose we think that we can find it elsewhere. However, as you point out, it doesn’t have to be that way. Not everyone has the money, the time, the health to travel. But we can all carve out some time, no matter where we are, to eat, pray, and love.
Huh.
i listened to the book on audio about 18 months ago. I didn’t read into the story in anyway as it seems that so many other women apparently have. I read it for what it was: a memoir of a year.
What I took away from the book was beautiful storytelling. Gilbert has a sweet way with words and I was jealous for her ability yet thankful that she shares her art with us.
I never once thought about women’s issues or replicating her story or trying to glean tidbits from it.
On the other hand, I did just quit my teaching job in order to pursue a career as a waitress and a writer. So there’s that.
Sarah-
I agree with you that one shouldn’t try to find themselves in a thing, person, or ideal. We simply are who we are and all the answers are within (whether we aware of them or not).
What I took away from this novel was the fact that life can be any kind of adventure you want it to be. For life is the greatest gift of all! So many of us get caught up in routine, bad relationships, bad habits, societal culture…etc that it doesn’t occur to us that WE are the change in the world. That we CAN up and leave, travel for a year if we want to. Will it be tough? Yes. Will there be sacrifices? Yes! But WE have the power. It’s within us all. Sometimes it just takes a whole lot of pasta, a friendly conversation, hot steamy sex, or just plan spontaneity.
Our “lives” too often dictate what we do, where we go, and for how long we do it. It’s the times where we throw out this rulebook that the answers appear. Go on that fishing trip you’ve always wanted to go on, play hooky and play that round of golf, go jump out of an airplane (hopefully with a fully working parachute), or whatever you always wanted to do. It’s what we do when no one is looking that reveals our character and who we truly are. And the more time we can be who we are, with no constraints, is what will lead us to our bliss.
I think it’s interesting that anything can read into anything – we see things as we are, not as they are.
I read EPL when I was separated from my husband and reinventing my self, and it was a breath of fresh air to me at that time. I didn’t see it as formulaic at all, in fact, Ms. Gilberts self-liberation from the cultural expecatations put upon her on how she ought to eat and look, do relationship, express her spirituality and her self were what resonated with me. I reconciled with my husband a new person, and I thank Gilbert for a book which really assisted with my redefinition of myself as a woman, a Christian and an artist. Her book made me realise I wanted to write again, that my story was imperfect, but worthwile telling. And I havent stopped writing, or living.
I havent seen the movie, it hasnt been released in Australia yet, but I am almost loathe to, even though I love Julia Roberts. The value of EPL for me transcends an entertainment experience, for me it was a spiritual one.
Nicely said – I had a very similar response to you & under similar circumstances albeit my trajectory ended with divorce. I don’t think there is any intent by Gilbert to suggest you need to “take a paid year off and live frivolously” but rather we must all nurture ourselves and build a relationship with God before happiness can be found with anyone else.
So beautifully said. Absolutely true. Women need to find themselves as themselves. Brilliant. We are constantly losing oursleves in something, looking for fulfillment. I’ve recently learned that what fulfills me, what makes me me, what gives me permission to be me in all circumstances, is the protection and sanctification of God’s favor – His GRACE. And now I can go out into the world because of His GRACE with arms wide open. Since I’m already fulfilled, and not looking for it, my entire life has taken on a new dimension.
I appreciate this piece and recommend this for men, too. We all can find a lot of wisdom and insight in Gilbert’s contemplations. Identity is a huge struggle in the 21st century. We Christians have a huge edge in this because God’s mission entails the pursuit of our self-actualization in Christ through his Spirit.
The degree of gender confusion is just one indicator that we need to pursue a journey to find ourselves as uniquely created beings whose purpose in life is genuinely worth enjoying.
What would the world be like if more humans possessed the courage to discover what Gilbert sought? I could imagine it would be more heavenly for sure.
The most interesting thing of all about, “Eat, Pray, Love” is the way that it’s being held up as though it’s preaching to all women. Maybe because of the mass marketing, it is. But in all fairness to Elizabeth Gilbert, she’s not encouraging other women to do this, she was writing a memoir, what happened to HER. Not an advice book, but a narrative. I think the real question is, why can’t there be a plethora of stories about women without each one being examined as though it should be this, or that, or more fair or more even-minded. Do we say this about men’s quest narratives? Just a thought…
Sure. I’ve seen this same sort of mis-application with Blue Like Jazz.