Jewcy‘s Izzy Grinspan may be overly-optimistic in reporting a backlash against Elizabeth Gilbert’s spiritually infantile Eat, Pray, Love, but we’re glad she called our attention to Maureen Callahan‘s “Eat, Pray, Loathe,” a spot-on take-down of the book and the cult of self-reverence that’s grown up around it. Callahan’s a perceptive critic, but the most damning words about Eat, Pray, Love come in the form of a
gushing testimony on Oprah by one of its well-heeled fans, speaking of the epiphany she experienced through a four-hour massage in Bali as she followed Gilbert’s trail:
It was just very special and it made me feel like, you know, ‘You can do anything.’ And then when I got home, I realized I didn’t need to go there, because all the work I need to do has to be done here. I need to say out loud what my problems are and what I want, ’cause I don’t do that. . . . It can be embarrassing sometimes, when you’ve got everything but what you really want you don’t have.
The reality, of course, is that most readers of Eat, Pray, Love don’t have everything, and certainly not the means to take the Gilbert cure of a year-long journey into the heart of indulgence. We see Gilbert readers on the subway everyday — middle-aged, working class women reading the book as they stand crushed in the morning rush, young women riding in from the boroughs to do the underpaid work of “entry-level” jobs that as often as not lead to defeated departure from the city, young, poor mothers clutching the book in one hand and a kid in the other.
They’re the victims of Gilbert’s spiritual snake oil as surely as fans of The Secret or Joel Osteen’s prosperity gospel who’re encouraged to respond to economic woes with magical thinking. No health insurance? Forced to work double shifts? Can’t afford enough heat? The problem, dear reader, is spiritual, not material. Join a union? Forget it. Work with a church group to demand legislative change? Stop worrying so much. All you need is love, and 15 bucks for a paperback to read on the train.
–Holly Berman