Millions of women have fallen for Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir of self-discovery. Why, asks Rachel Cusk, as Eat, Pray, Love opens as a Julia Roberts blockbuster.
The book's actual title, Eat, Pray, Love, is sincere, almost reverential: the function of the joke is to fumigate that sincerity regularly to allay any suspicion that the author is taking herself too seriously in her use of it. Not to mention the reader – for the words eat, pray and love might in themselves be an invocation of the lost or prohibited pleasures of femininity: hedonism, devotion, sensuality. Without quite knowing why, 21st-century woman finds this a powerful trinity to behold on the cover of a book. These monosyllables govern one another by means of an order both consolatory and somewhat foreign to modern female experience: eating first, loving last, and praying – an activity unpoliticised by the female psyche and one she might vaguely associate with being cared for, separating the two like a referee a pair of boxers in the ring.

The three words correspond to the book's three sections. These in turn refer to a highly schematised year of Gilbert's life, in which she lived consecutively in three different countries – Italy, India and Indonesia – to fulfil that title more or less on demand. In Italy she eats, in India she lives in an ashram, in Indonesia she finds physical passion, and nowhere is it suggested that fate was anything other than malleable to this plan, that Eat, Pray, Love might for instance have turned out to be a book about Catholicism, the Kama Sutra, and Balinese cookery.
Eat, Pray, Love can be placed unequivocally in this tradition. Women like this literature because it alleviates feelings of pressure without the attendant risks of rebellion or change. Nothing is lost or destroyed or interrogated by comedy, or at least not literally. Yet a book is a placement of internal material in public space. The more representative it is of what people personally feel, the more satisfying and necessary its publication.

The difference here is that the feeling and the representation are not quite the same. The suspicion arises that the female reader is being bled of her private tensions, of her rage, of her politics, in order to give the writer the attention she craves. The reader herself becomes the echo chamber; she may return to these tensions depleted by laughing at them, for if she privately experiences repugnance at her own body – for example – as unacceptable, as a form of failure, she will in some sense have betrayed herself by experiencing it publicly as success.
This voyage of self-discovery, it turns out, was a competition, at whose heart is a need to win. Gilbert refers once or twice in her book to a childhood in which she was driven to do well and achieve, and her failure to reconcile the forced fruits of female ambition with the realities of woman's destiny merely embroiders further the space between the two. Her Damascene epiphany in her New York bathroom might have led her not to break the life she had but to accept it, to exercise her capacity for devotion right there; she might have gone to Italy not to eat pasta but to acquire knowledge; she might have chosen not to live entirely and orgiastically in the personal – in pleasure – but instead to have renounced those interests in pursuit of a genuine equality.

But to say that, of course, would be to take it all much too seriously.

An Excerpt Taken from guardian.