The Anti Eat, Pray, Love

What's an EPL skeptic to do when faced with demands to see the film version?

It’s starting. We knew this day would come: the previews, the ads on the sides of buses, the propaganda like, "Let yourself go." Eat, Pray, Love the movie, based on Elizabeth Gilbert’s novel of the same name, is about to be released. As if this weren’t enough, we must even endure the arrival of an EPL clothing line (Eat, Pray, Love, Buy). And this is only the beginning of the franchise's merchandising, which includes home furnishings, jewelry, perfumes, teas, and, of course, tourist packages.

What are we – the EPL skeptics – to do when our friends tell us we just have to see this film? Is it sufficient to respond, “The book was loathsome – why would I see the movie?”

Hardly! For though your outrage would be righteous, it describes a thousand books distributed through the Barnes & Noble universe. Here is how I recommend handling oneself in an Eat, Pray, Love confrontation:

Start by saying you loved the book, and it is your dream to publish a complementary spiritual memoir: Eat, S@#!, Die. In this book, you arrive home one evening, look at your wife, decide she is no longer hot enough, leave her, buy a motorcycle, find a 19-year-old Cuban girl, put her on the back of the bike, and bomb down the Pan-American Highway to Costa Rica.

No doubt this will enrage many in the room, who bristle at your audacity to dub such a book a tale of spiritual awakening, even accuse you of setting back the equal rights movement by half a century. They might suggest your face should be illuminated on a Times Square jumbo screen with a ticker reading, "Do not date this man."

But how is this any different, you may respond, from Elizabeth Gilbert tromping round the world as if places and people exist exclusively for her to extract from them what she needs? If anything Eat, S@#!, Die is a deeply honest journey grappling with legitimate spiritual struggles and deprivations persisting in the kinds of places Elizabeth Gilbert seems to view as her spiritual Disneylands. Ours is a world where most people eat to survive, pray to have something to eat, live in their own excremental filth, and die quietly and anonymously. By turning the spiritual adventure into nothing more than a journey of self gratification, Elizabeth Gilbert fails to experience these places as what they are, and misses everything of value that there is to learn from these places – knowledge which could potentially result in profound spiritual awakening.

As for the defense of philandering in Eat, S@#!, Die, ask your angry mob about the protagonist’s husband in Eat Pray Love. Nearly every reader of EPL overlooks the fact that Gilbert was cheating on her husband before she was separated, and before she filed for divorce, just as they ignore that the divorce court judge decided against the author.

That the author had an affair is not disturbing. Many, many people – men and women – have affairs. However, it’s one thing to have an affair – quite another to characterize, and to capitalize on it as the beginning of a path to enlightenment.

When the people in the room get really mad at you, ask them what they know about how the publishing industry works.

In EPL, the narrator suggests she went on this spiritual journey because she was in crisis. This, unfortunately, is not how a book of this nature comes to be published. The author – an established New York glossy magazine and book writer – clearly pitched and sold a book proposal before she left for Italy, India, and Bali.

In short, the publishing house had likely already decided to make a celebrity out of the author, no matter what experience she described. This is how publishing operates. The publishers market only a certain number of books, namely those they are confident will make money.

Does it not bother readers that the spiritual lessons of EPL were pre-scripted by some Manhattan vice-president of marketing? This is not Richard Alpert becoming Ram Das and publishing Be Here Now; it's Kevin Costner donning buffalo fur and making Dances with Wolves.

If you’re still not winning the confrontation, tell your doubters that you have been to both Bali and Brazil. (You don’t even need to talk about Italy and India: everybody already knew Italian food was delicious, just as everybody knows the guru visited by the author is a charlatan.)

Concentrate on Bali. Say that everybody who visits Bali has powerful experiences, with rituals, people, celebrations, and festivals; these are the Balinese specialties! These rituals and the spiritual culture are what drive the island's entire economy. They are wonderful experiences that every visitor is invited to share. How suddenly does this author claim Bali as her island of discovery?

But let's wrap this up. Brazil. Specifically, sex with Brazilians.

This is the paramount awakening? Shagging some sexy Brazilian in a hotel room on the Gili Islands? The same Gili Islands where every post-adolescent Australian tourist goes to get laid? The same cinnamon-skinned Latinos whose lingering kisses are like melting chocolate? This is not a spiritual breakthrough; it's a sorority party!

I hope these outrages, and any ancillaries you contrive along with them, save you from having to go see Eat, Pray, Love. If not, you have only one remaining option: make new friends.