When not selecting Presidential nominees, Oprah Winfrey goes about her day job of instructing lesser mortals on what to buy, how to raise their children, and, most famously, what to read. Until proving her pull on the campaign trail – drawing tens of thousands of potential voters for Barack Obama – she has arguably had the most impact on the nation’s reading habits. And as many have noted, it’s hard to take issue with anything or anyone that encourages more people to buy, read and love books.
Except when it comes to this.
Last week, Winfrey devoted yet another show – her second in as many months – to her new favorite book, “Eat, Pray, Love.” In the event you are unfamiliar with this maddeningly ubiquitous title, it is a self-help-y memoir by Elizabeth Gilbert, a successful, affluent writer who, in her early 30s, locked herself in her bathroom night after night, crying on the floor over the state of her marriage. She got divorced, then went looking for answers, spending four months in Italy to eat, four months in India to find God (she says she did, even sat in his palm), then four months in Bali to pull it all together and maybe find love. During her second appearance on Oprah – seated in front of hundreds of devotees – she listened to testimonials such as these:
“I was a self-proclaimed atheist. But I have since found religion, and I made my bathroom my ashram.”
“Several women said to me, ‘This is the bible. You must read it.’ ”
“I don’t know that I’ve had my ‘bathroom floor moment,’ and maybe I need to.”
And this, from an assiduously manicured, middle-aged blonde woman, who retraced Gilbert’s trip to Bali and visited with Gilbert’s elderly medicine man (picture to prove it!) before getting a four-hour massage from her medicine woman:
“It was just very special and it made me feel like, you know, ‘You can do anything.’ And then when I got home, I realized I didn’t need to go there, because all the work I need to do has to be done here. I need to say out loud what my problems are and what I want, ’cause I don’t do that. . . . It can be embarrassing sometimes, when you’ve got everything but what you really want you don’t have.”
That statement, confused as it is, speaks to the most disturbing aspect of Gilbert’s book: it is the worst in Western fetishization of Eastern thought and culture, assured in its answers to existential dilemmas that have confounded intellects greater than hers. You may be a well-off white woman, but if you are depressed, the answer can be found in the East, where the poor brown people are sages. Gilbert’s nearly toothless, elderly medicine man often didn’t recognize her, and her medicine woman nearly hustled her out of $18,000, but these are inconvenient details her worshipful fans similarly disregard.
Christopher Hitchens surgically dismembers such nonsense in his recent bestseller (and tonic to this book) “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.” He writes that Westerners tend to “revere” Eastern religions as a reaction to Western colonialism, and that some readers, “will be shocked to learn of the existence of Hindu and Buddhist murderers and sadists.” (Indeed, Gilbert notes that once she did her research, she was unmoored to read of Bali’s own violent history.)
But it is probably safe to assume that Hitchens and Gilbert do not share readers. And so we have Gilbert’s fans (largely female, judging by Oprah’s audiences, online postings, and stats that show women account for 60-70 percent of all book sales) turning their bathrooms into ashrams, throwing “Eat, Pray, Love” dinner parties, and taking “Eat, Pray, Love” trips. The book has become such a phenomenon that Julia Roberts will star in the film adaptation and Gilbert is working on a sequel.
What is going on? Why is it that women, in overwhelming numbers, are now indulging in this silliness in a way that men are not? (To be fair, there was the equally unhinged “Iron John” movement in the ’90s.) Oprah’s audience has helped turn serious, artful literature like Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” and Elie Wiesel’s “Night” into bestsellers. So why aren’t they clamoring for more weight when it comes to Oprah’s female authors? Where’s the Joan Didion? Or Alice Munro?
Instead, we are saddled with this narcissistic New Age reading, curated by Winfrey (who is responsible for turning “The Secret” into the year’s best-selling book) and newly abetted by Gilbert, whose own book is 2007’s second best-selling title. During her most recent appearance on Winfrey’s show, Gilbert beamed beatifically while spouting stuff like: “If you take the word ‘no’ and put it backwards, it’s almost ‘om.’ ” “When you fill up your own skin with yourself, that alone becomes your offering.” “There are days when I look at that meditation mat in the corner of my room and say, ‘I’m gonna have to see you, like, Thursday, but I know you’re there and we’re coming back to each other.”
One could argue that there’s no harm in any of this; that if this book, these “philosophies,” this author are all spurring people to become happier, better versions of themselves, the effects can only be good. But the anecdotal evidence suggests that its readers are using “Eat, Pray, Love” as a shortcut to finding a spiritual “truth” (one that is not even theirs, but Gilbert’s), as an excuse to have that extra glass of wine, and as a license to abandon all critical thinking. As Hitchens writes: “The search for nirvana, and the dissolution of the intellect, goes on. And whenever it is tried, it produces a Kool-Aid effect in the real world.”