I did not read “Eat Pray Love” and I most certainly did not see the movie and that is saying something since I take great pride in my ability to sit through absolutely anything, from the simply tedious to the morally agonizing. I am quite the connoisseur of crap chick flicks and beach reads, but I just couldn’t bring myself to put up with Elizabeth Gilbert. I thought the book was kind of offensive, actually, though I guess it’s not really fair for me to judge since I read less than a paragraph before I commenced with the eye rolling and with the throwing of it across my loft. If I hadn’t been permanently scarred by an incident when I was four that involved a Winnie the Pooh picture book, some scissors and my irate dad shaking his finger at me, wildly screaming, “WE do NOT deface books in this house!” (I couldn’t bring myself to even highlight books when I was in college and I still have an unnatural fear of libraries), I may have lit it in a ceremonial bonfire in an act of literary rebellion and out of personal disgust. 

But love it or hate it, you certainly can’t deny Gilbert’s impact on people-- lots and lots of people. I was having a hard time understanding exactly why anyone else really cared about Gilbert’s personal journey; how their own longing was connected to this privileged woman’s premeditated (a nice book advance makes for some pretty awesome truffle pasta, some swanky caftans and lots of elephant rides) and fully funded-by-someone-else’s experience. I thought maybe it was that we’ve all just gotten used to this conscious/ produced faux reality because of the current trends in television programming, but the Bossy Blonde offered up her own theory:

“The book is successful because, even though she doesn’t give great detail as to why, you find her at the beginning, in total devastation, rock bottom and destroyed on the floor of her bathroom and you instantly care about her and where she’s going.”