There's a running gag in Elizabeth Gilbert's best-selling memoir of breakdown and recovery, concerning alternative titles she claims to have considered for her book. "A few times a week," runs one example, "Richard and I wander into town and share one small bottle of Thums Up – a radical experience after the purity of vegetarian ashram food – always being careful not to actually touch the bottle with our lips. Richard's rule about travelling in India is a sound one: 'Don't touch anything but yourself.' (And yes, that was also a tentative title for this book.)"
The book's actual title, Eat, Pray, Love, is sincere, almost reverential: the function of the joke is to fumigate that sincerity regularly to allay any suspicion that the author is taking herself too seriously in her use of it. Not to mention the reader – for the words eat, pray and love might in themselves be an invocation of the lost or prohibited pleasures of femininity: hedonism, devotion, sensuality. Without quite knowing why, 21st-century woman finds this a powerful trinity to behold on the cover of a book. These monosyllables govern one another by means of an order both consolatory and somewhat foreign to modern female experience: eating first, loving last, and praying – an activity unpoliticised by the female psyche and one she might vaguely associate with being cared for, separating the two like a referee a pair of boxers in the ring.
The three words correspond to the book's three sections. These in turn refer to a highly schematised year of Gilbert's life, in which she lived consecutively in three different countries – Italy, India and Indonesia – to fulfil that title more or less on demand. In Italy she eats, in India she lives in an ashram, in Indonesia she finds physical passion, and nowhere is it suggested that fate was anything other than malleable to this plan, that Eat, Pray, Love might for instance have turned out to be a book about Catholicism, the Kama Sutra, and Balinese cookery.
"It wasn't so much that I wanted to thoroughly explore the countries themselves," she writes. "This has been done. It was more that I wanted to thoroughly explore one aspect of myself set against the backdrop of each country, in a place that has traditionally done that one thing very well. I wanted to explore the art of pleasure in Italy, the art of devotion in India and, in Indonesia, the art of balancing the two. It was only later . . . that I noticed the happy coincidence that all these countries begin with the letter I. A fairly auspicious sign, it seemed, on a voyage of self-discovery."
This is the voice of 21st-century self-identity: subjective, autocratic, superstitious, knowing what it wants before it gets it, specifying even the unknown to which it purports to be abandoning itself. It is the voice moreover of the consumer, turning other realities into static and purchasable concepts ("tradition", "the art of pleasure") that can be incorporated into the sense of self. As though by a further extension of the author's all-powerful will, the book has been three different kinds of success: a critical success, a word-of-mouth bestseller, and the holy of holies, the basis of a film starring Julia Roberts. The new edition has a picture of Roberts on the front cover, a little plastic gelato spoon clamped between her lips. Whatever frisson remains, the sight of a "perfect" woman publicly displaying her greed was evidently judged sufficient at least to shift a few more copies.
The author's claim that she considered other titles is just one example of her expert use of the camouflage of humour. Gilbert's writing propounds a comic cult of female personality, a kind of literary incarnation of the "best friend". From the mouth of this witty warrior-woman the female reader is prepared to hear nearly anything, to have her gender secrets, her most private embarrassments, her deepest dissatisfactions disclosed. In "best friend" language, humour is a culturally approved manifestation of ambivalence, in which the love of life asserts itself over the admission of destructive desires.
Of course, this is a well-worn mode of female literary expression – Bridget Jones's Diary is a good example. The writer elects herself a girlish giant-slayer and strides forth into inadmissable regions of feminine experience: armed only with her personal charisma, her wit and her wisecracks, she sets about its taboos and its secret shames. Violent gender-specific emotions – hatred of one's own body, for instance – are recognised in the same moment as being neutralised by humour. Helen Fielding saw the link between herself and Jane Austen, who invented this genre in which the darkest aspects of female passivity and interiority give rise to an elaborated surface of verbal skirmishing. And at the end of it all the author curtsies – she was only joking, after all. It's a pretty performance, in whose echo chambers some readers are wont to discern the reverberation of emotional depths.
Eat, Pray, Love can be placed unequivocally in this tradition. Women like this literature because it alleviates feelings of pressure without the attendant risks of rebellion or change. Nothing is lost or destroyed or interrogated by comedy, or at least not literally. Yet a book is a placement of internal material in public space. The more representative it is of what people personally feel, the more satisfying and necessary its publication.
The difference here is that the feeling and the representation are not quite the same. The suspicion arises that the female reader is being bled of her private tensions, of her rage, of her politics, in order to give the writer the attention she craves. The reader herself becomes the echo chamber; she may return to these tensions depleted by laughing at them, for if she privately experiences repugnance at her own body – for example – as unacceptable, as a form of failure, she will in some sense have betrayed herself by experiencing it publicly as success.
But Eat, Pray, Love is more of a conundrum than it seems from this description, and to begin to understand it one has to examine what Gilbert would call the "backdrop". The book opens with her as a high-achieving, wealthy "career girl" in her early 30s, living au grand luxe with her husband in the suburbs of New York. "Wasn't I proud of all we'd accumulated – the prestigious home in the Hudson Valley, the apartment in Manhattan, the eight phone lines, the friends and the picnics and the parties, the weekends spent roaming the aisles of some box-shaped superstore of our choice, buying ever more appliances on credit? I had actively participated in every moment of the creation of this life – so why did I feel like none of it resembled me?" At night she often finds herself in the bathroom crying her eyes out. Why is she so unhappy? She is not sure she loves her husband; she feels obliged to have a baby but doesn't really want one. Her sister, a mother, has said to her (in a textbook example of the comic-ambivalent mode): "Having a baby is like getting a tattoo on your face. You really need to be certain it's what you want before you commit."
Crying in the bathroom one night she finds herself praying. She has never been a religious person, she tells us, but her despair is such that she reaches out to this vaguely benign entity – God – and is surprised to discover she feels better. She unearths her own capacity for devotion, or at least finds in "God" an object that – unlike any of the real or possible objects in her actual life – will satisfy it. Over the next few months she goes about extricating herself from what she doesn't "want" – at enormous financial and emotional cost – and formulates her elaborate international pan-cultural plan for self-discovery.
What do Gilbert's large, mostly female readership recognise in this rather tortuous, idiosyncratic and frankly fantastical story? There are several possibilities. One is that they venerate her for reintroducing the idea of the pleasure principle into female experience. She writes as a woman of 35, an age by which many of her readers will be married, to husbands they may experience – in her compelling description – as "my lighthouse and my albatross in equal measure"; will be wearing that facial tattoo, motherhood; will be shackled to houses of greater or lesser grandeur; will spend their free time with friends or in superstores – and will find their capacity for devotion exploited to the full by their sense of loyalty to these undertakings, their belief that they ought to honour their responsibilities and make the best of the life they've chosen for themselves, even if they sometimes feel that none of it resembles them.
Such a woman is never far from the necessity to cook or abstain from food, to perform an unselfish act, to exercise tolerance and self-sacrifice in relationships that define the core of our cultural conception of love. And she may feel, in the performance of this role, the emotional extremity Gilbert attributes to herself. To have these ordinary aspects of her life repackaged as pleasurable gives her a kind of mental lift; and as Nigella Lawson has discovered, selling the pleasure concept to over-committed women is big business.
The problem lies in the egotism of these female goddesses and gurus, who require their (female) audience to stand still while they twirl about, who require us to watch and listen, to laugh at their jokes, to admire their beauty and their reality and their freedom, to witness their successes. Elizabeth Gilbert is a relentless cataloguer of such successes, social, gastronomic, spiritual and sexual: the pizza she eats in Naples, the lover she takes in Bali, the friends she makes, even the quality of her transcendence at the ashram, all are perfect, the very best.
This voyage of self-discovery, it turns out, was a competition, at whose heart is a need to win. Gilbert refers once or twice in her book to a childhood in which she was driven to do well and achieve, and her failure to reconcile the forced fruits of female ambition with the realities of woman's destiny merely embroiders further the space between the two. Her Damascene epiphany in her New York bathroom might have led her not to break the life she had but to accept it, to exercise her capacity for devotion right there; she might have gone to Italy not to eat pasta but to acquire knowledge; she might have chosen not to live entirely and orgiastically in the personal – in pleasure – but instead to have renounced those interests in pursuit of a genuine equality.
But to say that, of course, would be to take it all much too seriously.
Eat, Pray, Love opens in cinemas this weekend.
