Like most readers, I devoured Eat, Pray, Love pretty quickly, finding it to be eloquently written, eagerly honest, and fairly perceptive of culture, relationships, and of the self.
Through her engaging memoir, Elizabeth Gilbert invites us all to peek into her self-reflective quest after a painful divorce. Don’t we all wish we could replace painful relationships with glamorous travel involving relaxation and reflection? Unfortunately, most of us are not able to pursue such endeavors, so we are relegated to living vicariously through reading Eat, Pray, Love. Better yet, now we can skip the book and head to the theater.
For most of us, self-reinvention involves switching from coffee to green tea, though we are constantly encouraged to change things up and become a better person. On the newsstands, O, the Oprah Magazine offers “The Makeover Issue! 178 inspiring ways to change things up (Oprah did!).” Real Simple wants us to perpetually make our life easier (usually through buying more stuff to organize the other stuff we already own). Perhaps those of us who are drawn to spiritual memoirs secretly hope we’ll find the subtle answer to a fulfilling and satisfying life.
Would Gilbert’s book sell like hotcakes if it were written as a biography? Probably not. Most consumers would be less enthusiastic to pick up a book about a woman who goes through a vague divorce, gorges on pizza in Italy, does some “oms” in India, and meets a male replacement in Indonesia. When choosing a biography to read, most of us look for a hero to emulate, someone whose entire life story is worth telling. Instead, Eat, Pray, Love offers us a way to act fly on the wall for an up-close glimpse at another person’s spiritual journey.
Traveling offers the alluring opportunity to self-reinvent, allowing us to leave painful memories behind so we can understand other cultures and simultaneously engage in personal discovery. After reading Eat, Pray, Love, I coincidentally began Bill Bryson’s journey on the Appalachian Trail in A Walk in the Woods, and although they are both traveling memoirs, Bryson purposefully draws conclusions from beyond his own experiences with observations about his surroundings. He brilliantly mixes history and cultural scrutiny with hilariously deadpan anecdotes from his travels. “If a product or enterprise doesn’t constantly re-invent itself, it is superseded, cast aside, abandoned without sentiment in favor of something bigger, newer, and alas, nearly always uglier,” he writes.
In contrast, Gilbert’s engagement with the surrounding culture always seems to lead back to herself, from indulging in Italian pizza, to her wandering thoughts during meditation in India, to her altruistic attempt at financing a healer’s shop in Indonesia. Predictably, she is swept off her feet by a Brazilian man for the happy ending. She writes, “I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue.” Despite her reassurance, it is hardly convincing.
Gilbert is not the only author who has experienced personal success through personal narrative. Spiritual memoirs seem like quick sellers for Christian publishers, with popular hits from authors like Donald Miller and Anne Lamott, to recent books from Susan Isaacs, Jason Boyett, and Rachel Held Evans. In our interest in others’ spiritual quests, however, perhaps we are losing sight of another valuable genre: the biography. Last year, Chris Armstrong eloquently argued for CT that Christians should regain the lost spiritual discipline of reading biographies.
Of this I am convinced: Biographical narratives have power. They carry the potential to bring deep transformation. But today, we have lost some of our forebears’ sense of the power of life stories. I think this began happening at the beginning of the 20th century.
Conveniently, Eric Metaxas’ 500-page biography Bonhoeffer (Thomas Nelson) currently stands in the way of finishing my summer reading list. It sits on my shelf, as if to mock: “You will never finish me.” While Eat, Pray, Love offers a convenient escape from daily realities, Bonhoeffer offers the tale of a radical theologian’s daring (and fatal) quest to resist Nazism. Somehow, the two don’t seem to compare.
