I just finished reading Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
and joined the ranks of millions of other middle-aged, Starbucks-swilling, gym-going readers. Good Lord, I hate being predictable. At least I didn't read it for a book club.

Eat, Pray, Love is the memoir of Elizabeth Gilbert. Flush with book advance money, Gilbert runs off to Italy, India, and Bali to recover from a soul crushing divorce and a turbulent rebound-boyfriend. She goes to Italy to learn Italian, to India to learn how to meditate, and to Bali to meet up with some shyster medicine man that she met on a previous trip.

Memoirs ask a lot of their readers. Not only do you have to like their writing and their tales, but you have to like the authors as people. You sort have to be friends with them. Gilbert is a hard person to be friends with. She's rather self-involved. She devotes pages and pages to the task of figuring out which word might embody her entire essence. Ariel Levy recently wrote, "one generally doesn’t indulge another person’s
emotional processing at
this length unless the jabbering is likely to conclude with sex."

She's also a drama queen who takes four years to get over a divorce. I cross the road to avoid people like that, because they just talk about themselves for hours and hours on the phone and never ask you about yourself. Four years is a long time to brood about a divorce that you instigated. I've had some bad break ups in my day, but nothing that took four years to heal. The worst break up required four months of grieving and a summer with a sliding-scale shrink on Central Park West.

While waiting for my appointment one afternoon, I overheard some guy in the waiting room saying that he described himself as someone who hung around in circles with people who were friends with Uma Thurman. In other words, he defined himself as a friend of a friend of Uma Thurman. He really needed his sliding-scale shrink. /tangent

Still, there is something of value in this book. Even for a non-yoga person like myself, her descriptions of life in an ashram, Balinese culture, and the lives of expats were fascinating. She certainly had a marvelous adventure traveling around the world to remote corners of the world. She lovingly describes the off-beat characters that she meets on her travels.

Gilbert also taps into the desire that we all have to cut ourselves loose from responsibilities and mundane routines and to sidle up to a bar in Key West. No mortgage, no job, no after-school pick ups, no piano recitals. Just a backpack and passport. Sound good, huh? Even better than that.. How about a whole year where you do nothing but think and write about your own mysterious inner-workings? She's a self-indulgent hippie. 

I have a weakness for hippies though. In this area of the country with driven elites and their three-car garages and status symbol boots, it's refreshing. And, maybe by the end of the book, I even became friends with Gilbert.