Since you asked… how someone like me could like Eat, Pray, Love

Categorized as “chick lit,” Eat, Pray, Love cultivated quite a following several years back. I ignored it, because *those* types of women watch Lifetime and join Jenny Craig.

No, thanks.

Oprah got involved and I knew for sure I wasn’t going to like the book.

She liked Twilight, for crying out loud.

Then Julia Roberts signed on for the movie version.

Strike three.

Eventually, I did read Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir and fell in love with it. This annoyed a few friends, who couldn’t understand why I’d turned into such a huge disappointment.

“You’re becoming one of the masses,” a delightful creature told me. “And you always said the masses are asses. Next thing you know, you’ll be faking orgasms and saying ‘literally’ all the time.”

Good lord.

Based on those reactions, I didn’t tell many people that I liked the book. I was afraid I’d get kicked out of the Margaret Cho fan club.

Perhaps, though, I should have explained my thoughts to my husband.

I told him that I related to Elizabeth Gilbert and the premise of her memoir sounded interesting to him; I also mentioned that she got her start writing for men’s magazines. So he downloaded the book and we listened to it on the way to Boston.

We got as far as the sixth chapter.

He wondered, out loud, for twenty minutes somewhere in rural Georgia, how I could relate to a woman who wanted neither a marriage, nor children, and instead wished to escape halfway around the world and write.

“Is there something you want to tell me, Katie?” he asked.

Oh my.

I said that I related to her struggle for something better. Instead of focusing on others, Gilbert looked within. Yes, she no longer wanted to be married, and took off for Italy, India, and Indonesia, but it was to discover true happiness within herself.

I know. It sounds insufferable.

But Eat, Pray, Love isn’t insufferable. It’s refreshingly devoid of easy sentiment and resonates with those of us who believe our own truth should always triumph over what other people expect us to do. Perhaps Gilbert’s tome touched me because, while reading it, I was arriving at my own kind of crossroads.

Beginning a year ago this month, several health scares combined to encourage within me a life-change of sorts. Unlike Gilbert, I had a happy marriage with no intention of leaving. I also happen to enjoy being a mother. My children are the ultimate celebration of love and hope.

Even though sometimes they make me want to pull out my eyebrows.

No, unlike Gilbert, my personal life was good. My health improved and yet, I still couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off. Then it hit me. I was happy in every aspect of my life – except professionally.

As a writer, I was becoming a bit of a bitch. And, while sometimes that is a perfectly rational way of communicating, my constant crabbiness expressed in the written word was getting old.

I also could no longer ignore the fact that my love affair with politics felt unhealthy. A lifelong activist, I poured my heart into progressive movements and politicians and believed we were meant to be together forever. Participation in that process was the paradigm through which I viewed the world and it was also my way of making that world a better place.

Somewhere along the way, though, politics stopped loving me back.

And, as many of my longtime readers know, if the love is gone, so am I.

Politicians got elected and disappointed me. Locally and nationally, the climate became depressing. I reacted by writing about social issues with more venom. I hurt people. And that bad juju was backing up on me worse than my mom’s meatloaf when I was a kid.

Through it all, I had my good points. Lifelong friends and family members read through my rants and understood I was trying, in my own special way, to help people. But, like my dear Uncle Joe once suggested, change is hard to encourage in people who are no longer listening.

Around the same time, I noticed that when I wrote with humor, people reacted differently. I wrote ridiculous posts about family and the response was overwhelmingly positive. I still write with an edge, but the tone is friendlier and funnier. Hate mail subsided and I now have regular writing gigs at Creative Loafing and The Tampa Tribune.

Signs, I believed, that I was heading in the right direction.

I didn’t have to travel to Bali or Rome to figure this out. And Eat, Pray, Love didn’t teach me anything I don’t already know. Gilbert simply reminds us: be true to yourselves. Stop looking elsewhere for answers, because those answers are instead within your own heart and soul.

Of course, until recently, I never fully articulated why I liked Gilbert’s memoir. I just told people to read Eat, Pray, Love and allowed them to come to their own conclusions.

It took more than a few minutes, but after I explained the reasoning behind why I understood Gilbert’s dissatisfaction, because I felt it in a different area of my life, Husband got it. I can appreciate someone’s struggle, without sharing it.

But he still didn’t like the memoir.

Husband couldn’t get past why Gilbert left what seemed to be a perfectly nice guy and didn’t approve of writing about him in negative ways. Knowing she exposed an ex-husband, creating hurt feelings and broken dreams, took the joy of the journey away from him.

“Self-discovery is fine,” he said, “but I have to question the morality of evolving at the expense of someone else.”

Those are valid points. But between him and my friends, I regretted buying that new “I Heart Elizabeth Gilbert” t-shirt.

We never went back and listened to the rest of the book.

A twenty-hour car drive with two ten year-olds is rough enough.

Then, while in Boston, my friend Jeff Houck called to ask me about Eat, Pray, Love for an article he was writing in the Trib. Now I’d talk to Jeff about anything, even paint drying, because he’ll find a way to make it interesting. But I was scared to admit to the entire Tampa Bay community, and world at large, that I liked, that I adored, this book.

I feared I’d never hear the end of it.

But since I’ve always been honest about every other aspect of my life, I figured I’d be honest about this, too. I was once a John Edwards fan. How bad could this be?

Ultimately, Jeff and I talked about why I enjoyed the book and my horror at actually looking forward to a Julia Roberts film. And he did write it down for the world to read.

Click here for Jeff’s article.

I have taken some guff about the irony of it all. A nonconformist, feminist type finding beauty in a popular book about self-discovery.

But instead of defending myself, when people give me shit, I now simply tell them to suck it. How’s that for evolved?

I loved the book, and am looking forward to the movie.

So there.

At least it’s not Twilight.

Tags: creative loafing, Eat Pray Love, Eat Pray Love the movie, Elizabeth Gilbert, Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir, Jeff Houck, The Tampa Tribune