eat, pray, love, vomit

I just saw that Eat, Pray, Love (Elizabeth Gilbert, 2006, memoir) is going to be a movie, starring Julia Roberts. Maybe that's as it should be--a romantic comedy starring Pretty Woman.

The book, though, the book is ice cream, complete with the brain freeze headache. I was sick of its lovely fun sentences before Gilbert even got to Italy, let alone India and wherever she met the hunk who saved her sorry soul.

This memoir is to the art of creative nonfiction as limerick is to the art of poetry. It is engaging for awhile. You laugh. You meet interesting people--so many that you wonder seriously exactly where "creative" and "nonfiction" meet. You know from the self-pity of the first scenes crying in the bathroom exactly how it will all end.

But a limerick is only five lines long.

Gilbert's sentences are, indeed, masterful--if only she'd write about something more substantive than her own overprivileged world in which she can ask for--and get--a book deal out of a failed marriage to a perfectly decent human being. "Oh, dear, I've married the wrong man, I need a trip around the world, hey, will you pay for it and I'll write you a book?"

[The publisher, along with Ms. Gilbert, get to laugh all the way to the bank...]

Someone--BK Loren? B.E. Pinkham? Jeannette Walls? Jean Harper?-- SOMEONE owes it to thinking women everywhere to write something fun and funny that goes a little deeper than this self-involved celebration of mediocrity! We need food, love, God. The concept is intriguing and universal. The carnal sides of food, love, and God are equally intriguing and universal. It's fertile ground for true human experience, where the harvest is Truth. Soul-sustaining and deeply satisfying.

Gilbert harvests Sweet Tarts.

If this were a work of fiction, it would be a fluffy beach read, appropriate for a quick getaway into our richly peopled imaginary worlds.

But it is not fiction.

I am reminded of the late Narcissus, who found the true love of his life by looking at his own reflection...