Eat Grade Gripe

I’ve just finished this memoir by Elizabeth Gilbert, “Eat Pray Love.” Whenever I’m up against a memoir, or even someone’s blog thoughts, I get to comparing my life to theirs, and things get existential fast. I was reading a blog the other day in which the guy used the term “anti-essentialist,” and it struck me with shame and consternation that I had never used the term “anti-essentialist” in my life, and frankly that I am never going to, except in self-conscious laments like this one. But then another blogger confessed that she didn’t feel very intellectual because she rarely reads novels, and I rebounded from my anti-essentialist angst and felt thrillingly intellectual.

In “Eat Pray Love,” the author is recovering from a marital collapse and several other collapses, and she goes on a year’s sabbatical to Italy (that’s the Eat), an ashram in India (the Pray) and a ridiculously enviable four months in Bali (which includes the Love, who is named Felipe). I think calling the book “Eat Pray Enjoy Sex” wouldn’t have had the same punch, though it might have been more accurate.

She says she was recovering from a really rough time in her life, and I think we have to believe her, because there’s nothing worse than people who say, as you’re contemplating throwing yourself into a volcano, after first chopping off your hair and writing “THINGS SUCK IN MY LIFE” on your forehead, “Oh, come on, you know it wasn’t that bad.”

But I do have to say that Elizabeth Gilbert is really good at recovering. She does it with style and verve. The union with God comes just as required. I mean, what would you do if you were at an ashram — with the book contact already signed! — and you *weren’t* making any mind-blowing progress? Think of the pressure. She seems wired for spiritual progress, though, so I think they were safe in giving her the book contract.

And then the interlude in Bali: what a very picturesque, stylish, idyllic, hedonic way of making your recovery. She basically becomes best friends with two traditional healers, and then this adoring smooth-tongued (and I mean that in all possible ways) Brazilian Felipe comes striding into Paradise, and ...

I was sitting here in my debris-strewn house with my pile of infuriating ungraded quizzes and papers, and wondering if having a nervous collapse would qualify me to go to Italy, India and Bali and experience bliss in three different dimensions.

The remedies for my aggravations are a lot less picturesque, when there are remedies at all. It’s “Eat Grade Gripe” in this house.

This may just be the usual end-of-term crankiness.

In the end of the book, Felipe is trying to win her over to the idea that their bliss can be long-lasting, and he proposes that they divide their time between Australia, Brazil, and Bali. She prepares to surrender herself to the idea that bliss might work out after all...

The blurb on the book jacket notes laconically that she now lives in Philadelphia, so I’m wondering if there’s an ending there that didn’t quite make it into the book.

I don’t have a moral for this all. All I can say is that, fortunately, I’m the kind of anti-intellectual who never uses the term “Schadenfreude” in a sentence, so I couldn’t possibly be guilty of it.