Sunday Scribblings: Art(less) Observations on Reading Eat Pray Love For the Third Tme

It was the pick for book club this month, the second time someone from this group has chosen this book to read. No one objected -- no one even seemed to remember that we'd picked it more than a year ago -- and several were thrilled: they said they'd had this book sitting on the shelves for ages and had never quite gotten around to reading it. I wasn't going to complain, either: the first time I'd read this book, I was so sad to see it end, I just turned back to page one and read it through cover to cover. Since then, it's stayed on my office shelves -- no basement storage for this one -- and I was looking forward to the opportunity to read it again.

And I am enjoying the experience. I want to make that clear. Ms. Gilbert is in many ways an excellent traveling companion: good-humored, attentive to compelling detail, a lively narrator. She reignites dormant desires to learn Italian, makes me crave the experience of eating pizza in Naples or sharing an evening meal with friends at a Roman villa, and awakens real lust to travel to India and Indonesia. I appreciate the reminder to avoid giving in to indulgence -- even just once -- lest indulgence become a tendency. And I am glad to come across her references to different types of meditations (strategies I intend to research as soon as I am finished with the book). She makes it seem possible to cultivate a personal relationship with God, to feel God's presence in one's life. That she at least makes this attempt and succeeds on any level makes the book worth reading, at least for me.

Early on in the book, though, she describes herself as a golden retriever with barnacle tendencies, and this time around, these traits seem more assertive than I remembered them. She's just a little too eager to please, a little too eager to establish herself as bright, personable, attractive. She talks too much when she should listen; too frequently turns the reader's attention back to her own feelings and observations when perhaps the reader might have preferred to linger a few minutes longer over an idea or an experience just introduced.

As travelogue, the book works fine. As memoir, though, it is far less satisfying. Ms. Gilbert's personal circumstances may change over the course of the book, but her character doesn't: despite the devastation she suffered as her marriage unraveled at the beginning of the book, the person she describes then seems too similar to the person we meet at the end, when tears and frustration have been replaced by peace and new love. There's no insight offered, too little reflection either about the person she was, or about how her experiences have altered her, making her capable of the new happiness she discovers. The absence of this kind of reflection could lead a person to think that her transformation was simply the result of her travels. As for me, I'm suspicious: in my experience change always comes at a cost, and her lack of discussion about this cost makes me feel that the high pitch of personal chatter in some parts of the story is a smokescreen, meant to deflect the reader from some of her harder introspection, darker considerations that she is unwilling to share.

That's ok, of course. There's nothing that obligates a writer, even a memoirist, to reveal everything. It's just I wish she had been more forthcoming about what she was willing to reveal, and what she wasn't; it could have made her experience more universal, less dependent on having the means and opportunity to spend a year in Italy, India, and Indonesia, much more accessible.

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This isn't the first time I've had trouble with a first person narrator. Maybe you could call it I-fatigue, but lately I've been finding these memoirists a troublesome lot: by turns self-absorbed, deceptive, dismissive of other points of view; occasionally, dull -- failings I recognize all too well in my own flawed character.

I'm having a hard time with the I in my own writing, too. Who is this "I" who keeps showing up at the page, this avatar I use to negotiate the web: what is this mask I wear? Why does she talk about food and gardening all the time? What is all this interest in poetry from someone who spends most of her days tutoring math or badgering her daughter to pick up her room? Why all this talk about yearning -- is it some manufactured discontent?

None of it is a deliberate lie, but it's not a complete picture, either. And lately the fit has felt off, as if I were trying to struggle into those pants I haven't worn in 15 years, or, to use another metaphor, as if I were trying to pitch my voice for a range that no longer suits me.

There's change in the air, but its destination is a mystery, and the course uncertain. I'm moving slowly these days: words stick, verbs hesitate, and in general I feel more like cocooning than trying to fly, more like reading than writing. And after finishing Eat Pray Love, I think I'm going to want to read The Cloister Walk again. Maybe a recommendation for book club next month? Who cares if I picked it once before, or that people found it difficult, or no one made it past Chapter 3? That was ten years ago. Surely, they've forgotten it all by now.

Sunday Scribblings