avphibes

So you may or may not have heard of this bestselling memoir called "Eat, Pray, Love" which is supposedly an inspiring tale of an unhappy woman who goes on a world-spanning quest to find spiritual balance, inner peace and herself. It was on Oprah and is rapturously fawned over by many women as an "inspiration." But I stand up and call shenannigans, because this is what I saw when I read the book: A bourgeois pathological narcissist--with mental issues that clearly needed to be addressed-- went on a year-long luxury vacation consisting entirely of navel-gazing and whining about her problems to anyone who'll listen, got a new boyfriend and then acted like all her problems were solved when it seems like she actually learned nothing.

One of the reasons I was so exasperated with our intrepid author was that she seems just like how I was in college (OMG, I'm like SOOOO upset about this guy who broke up with me because I think he was my soul-mate, you know, and like, I think he'll totally realize that I am totally the one for him but I know I have to take my mind off of it, but first let's, like, talk about it in detail for, like, another five hours because I'm so totally totally devastated and this is like the WORST thing that ever happened, EVER!) But she's MY AGE! I would've hoped that a woman in her mid-30's would be a little more level-headed. But then, she is decidedly not level-headed and she tells us so.

She tells us that she can't sleep at night and stays up for hours on end crying and feeling hopeless and desperate. She has sudden panic attacks when she's alone and contemplates suicide. In other words, she is pretty much the textbook person who really, really ought to take anti-depressants. But this is the part of the book that kind of profoundly bothered me the most: She gets all up on her high horse about NOT taking anti-depressants and never learns the most valuable lesson that one can learn from anti-depressants and, therefore, will probably never escape her problems, (although she TELLS us at the end that everything is a-ok, but I'm very very skeptical.)

Our author says she tried taking anti-depressants for a little while, but she apparently did not learn what I think is the important lesson one should learn from taking anti-depressants: That not all your feelings are legitimate. That, in fact, some of your feelings are totally irrational and crazy and should not be indulged. That your mind does, in fact, play tricks on you and you can start to recognize when it's lying to you.

And so this woman does the thing that many narcissistic creative types do and says that she doesn't want to take anti-depressants because she doesn't want her personality altered or her feelings numbed...because narcissistic creative types want to believe that all their feelings are totally valid and totally important because they are such special, sensitive, deep people who people don't understand because they are not as sensitive and deep. How dare anyone suppose that their incredibly profound feelings might not be real! I mean...this is who they ARE!

And so I, the reader, get dragged through this book by this woman who, rather than working through her feelings, seeks out every human being she can find along her path to whine to so they can validate her feelings. She talks about how she makes friends wherever she goes, which means she never REALLY learns to be emotionally self-sufficient since she still has her constant external validation. You get the feeling that the reason she can't get over her divorce and the breakup of her post-divorce affair is just because she lost her validators...which is, of course, why the book ends happy when she finds a NEW validator. This is why I had the dubious feeling at the book's end that she learned nothing. That all her world travel and all her transcendental meditation was not her path to a better life and understanding of self, but just the interim lark between boyfriends who would assure her that she was good enough and smart enough and doggone it, people like her. (And, of course, now she has Oprah and legions of fans to tell her the same thing.)

Books like this always make me kind of downtrodden about the state of my gender and our need to rally around our own weaknesses and try to twist them around to make us heroes. Are we women too in love with hugging each other while we cry to become strong people? Are we afraid of being actually strong because only victims get hugs?