Eat, Pray, Love
Elizabeth Gilbert
(Viking)

This is an oldie (2006) but Gilbert's attitude, her tone if you will, pissed me off so much I had to write and tell you about it.

Elizabeth Gilbert is the voice of modern-day, privileged, upper class America: Boring, self-obsessed, superficial, sniveling. And entitled.

Elizabeth, or Liz as she prefers to be called, is a woman who gets things done, and gets them done her way ... or else whines about it unendingly.

After a split with her husband under ambiguous circumstances --- he may have found out the truth about her sniveling ways --- Liz decides to journey to foreign lands to, you guessed it, eat, pray and love.

During this trip Liz achieves a year what for the rest of us might take a whole lifetime ... or longer. Eating pasta e fagioli and gnocci buns while living in a posh Italian villa? Check. Attaining enlightenment, full-throated gold-encrusted nibbana with the assistance of two personal gurus? Check. Going to Bali to find a diamond-plated soul-mate to fall in love with and marry? Check!

Is that all, you ask? Well, no. Liz also manages to get her publisher to pay her to do all of this eating and soul-searching and falling in love ... in advance. It's a good thing, too, that she did this in her allotted time, since Eat, Pray, and Bankrupt Your Ass probably wouldn't have sold nearly as well.

--- Jasmine Worth