I HATED That Book: The Movie!

(We were so sick! We're all better now, but there is QUITE the bug going around.)

I have only rarely deleted posts but my favorite one that I ever deleted was a truly demented rant about how much I HATED HATED HATED "Eat Pray Love." And even now just thinking about that book makes me dry-retch into the wastebasket.

So anyhoo. I deleted that post because I decided, after calm reflection, that I sounded like a nut. But before I deleted it, I did get some of my more amusing hate mail ("Your a jealous little bitch!" wrote some deeply wounded person. Yes I is.) and the thought of all of it kept me warm through many a winter's night. And I know that while I'm not alone in my hatred of the freaking thing, I'm certainly in a minority ("How can anyone hate that book?" asked a wounded acquaintance. How indeed.), since it apparently spoke to many, many women including, of course, Oprah. Of course!

And now it's going to be a movie! I was walking into Toy Story 3 and there, right in front of me, was Julia Roberts bathed in golden light, Eat-Pray-Loveing someplace. "Gwyneth Paltrow was ROBBED," I gasped to my husband. "That was the role she was BORN to play."

"OH NO," groaned my husband.

In point form, here is why Eat Pray Love is a bad, bad book and why it will almost certainly be a bad, bad movie:

1) "You'd like me if you met me."

She writes this - or says this, since she has one of those cheerful chatty writing styles - in the first chunk of the book. We'd like her if we met her, she is pretty sure, since she is SUPER good at the type of short-term pleasant pseudo-intimate relationships that The Travel People are good at. ("The Travel People" is a friend's term for a certain type of person: not someone who travels to GO specific places but someone who views travel itself in a desperately mystical light. They are invariably affluent, unsettled and white, and tend to be both condescending to people who haven't traveled as much as they have - which is pretty much everyone, most of us lacking both the time and the money to spend our lives on constant vacation - and lacking in actual knowledge of the places they've been to. "Venice was a spiritual high for me," A Travel Person told my friend. "France is such a special place.")

But WHO says this? Who thinks that everyone is going to like them?

I certainly don't. I think I'm all right - well, I would - but I have a reasonably clear view of myself and my flaws. I'm both argumentative AND thin-skinned! I can be rather dismissive of opinions that I think are goofy and am rather scathing, too. I'm lazy AND I also tend to expect my friends to do the heavy emotional lifting in relationships. I am - in short - a flawed human being. So I certainly do not think that everyone will like me immediately upon contact and also I do not think that I am the Universal Friend.

There are people who have a lot of personal charisma, who are charming and friendly and who do seem - however briefly - like the Universal Friend - but it seems narcissistic to claim to be one of their number. It seems like she is stating right off the bat that she is not merely the narrator of the book but the heroine, the very center. She deserves the good fortune that is certain to come, but do not worry! She deserves it because we would, she assures us, like her if we met her.

2) Eat
This was my least-hated part of the book. Who DOESN'T think it sounds like fun to go to Italy for four months to learn Italian and eat? That sounds like a great time. I am not against books about happiness, about happy people - they strike me as a necessary tonic to the overwhelming despair of our age.

But do books about affluent people enjoying affluent pleasures spread more happiness or more dissatisfaction? And why did I phrase what was obvious a foregone conclusion in the form of a question?

3) Pray
ARGH! ARGH!

The ashram she goes to in India has, she assures us, a lot of celebrity clients. It's really exclusive! And expensive! And my head fell off with rage because that's the way we describe a restaurant or a nightclub and really NOT a good sign about a place that's supposed to be taking care of your IMMORTAL SOUL.

You are not going to reach enlightenment in four months. You are not going to spend your way to spiritual - and I hate the word "spiritual" so much, primarily because of people like Elizabeth Gilbert - fulfillment. That's not how it works.

The book, wrote Maureen Callahan in a hilariously scathing review in the NYPost, "is the worst in Western fetishization of Eastern thought and culture, assured in its answers to existential dilemmas that have confounded intellects greater than hers. You may be a well-off white woman, but if you are depressed, the answer can be found in the East, where the poor brown people are sages. Gilbert's nearly toothless, elderly medicine man often didn't recognize her, and her medicine woman nearly hustled her out of $18,000, but these are inconvenient details her worshipful fans similarly disregard."

Remember that part? Remember when the guy she traveled ALL THE WAY AROUND THE WORLD TO BE WITH DID NOT REMEMBER HER? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

(And this is part of the whole Travel People thing: mistaking brief, casual acquaintances for actual relationships, for people who actually LIKE you.)

Religion - not the kind we package up and sell to the unsatisfied rich - is about the questions in life: why do we live, how should we live, why do we die, why do we suffer, are we alone. It is also about our relationship with the world, our responsibilities. And there is deep, deep joy in faith, and the feeling of being loved and forgiven has helped me through many a bad night, but it's not, at the end of the day, about me being happy. Happiness is not the point. It might happen, it might not. So?

4) Love
A lot of women love this book, Oprah prominently among them. And who doesn't want pleasure, fulfillment, and love?

There are ways to have inner peace, certainly - prayer, meditation, faith, or even just being grateful and centered - but for the most part, I think that inner peace is the providence of people prone to that sort of thing. My inner self is jittery and chatty and even if I traveled all the way to India, I would still be hauling my jittery, chatty self with me.

The big change in my life - and I did have one - came from nearly dying, from the realization that my time with my kids might be limited and that I was wasting this finite time with my unhappiness and my moping. But I can't package that up for you, I can't sell it to you with a big bow on top.

But the Oprah-style of happiness comes at a creepy cost: Leave your family! Quit your job! Spend a whole lot of money! What we have, we are assured, isn't making us happy, but someplace out there is a stranger we can pay to tell us how to be happy forever, to tell us how our lives should be, now that we are free of our encumbrances. We will be taken care of, like a cheerful smiling pretty baby, safe in the hands of hired strangers who know better than we do about what we need, what we want, what our futures hold.

But you can't buy happiness and you certainly can't keep it. Happiness just comes when it comes, and then sneaks away again. Anyone trying to sell you happiness is selling you a mirage, snake oil, a handful of dust.