Last year, I read Elizabeth M. Gilbert’s quest story Eat, Pray, Love. With the tagline “One Woman’s Quest for Everything,” and based on Gilbert’s own experiences, the book is the kind of popularized self-help/spiritual crossover that appeals to the specific female market that turned Chicken Soup to the alma a worldwide phenomenon for a decade. earlier.

Structurally, it is quite basic. As she cries on her bathroom floor, reflecting on the dissolution of her marriage, Liz decides to pray. And then (being a travel writer), she decides to travel and write about her experiences, first in Italy (where she falls in love with food), then in an Ashram in India (where she throws herself into prayer to find its ‘balance’). ), and finally Bali (where she accidentally loses her balance and finds love again, both with herself and with an older Brazilian gentleman). Formulative and two, or at least it would be, if it were fiction.

Fortunately, the book is a more detailed examination of how depression can engulf you, how eating remains one of the most primal and exhilarating pleasures, how praying is basically telling yourself to hold back, and how achieving satisfaction is quite simple. And bread. There is a lot of bread. Liz comes across as a bit of a masochist: she goes from one dysfunctional relationship to another, until she literally has to run away from herself to find her place in the world again.

Last night I saw the film version at the cinema. OK, so it’s a chick flick; with its self-help demographics, it was never going to be anything else. But it’s nice. Julia Roberts plays the egotistical and whiny American leading lady very well. Which is fine, because that’s exactly Liz’s character: she’s annoying at first, then relatable, then vulnerable. She’s not someone you’re supposed to love or want to emulate; she’s just an ordinary woman (described by one lover as “thin from afar, soft up close”), searching for something more within her already privileged existence.

This theme of therapeutic self-indulgence is something we are often made to feel guilty about, and something Gilbert received criticism for when the book first came out. But if she takes it for what it is, a selfish and relatively pointless quest, she can begin to understand why the book appeals to people who travel away from the reality of their problems. Which is basically everyone.

The film features some beautiful cinematography, particularly the wedding scene in India and the panoramic shots of the rice fields in Bali (one of my favorite countries). It would also be rude not to mention the gloriously indulgent restaurant scenes in Italy, something that prompted my friend Yona (who is also a huge fan of the book and who I went to see the movie with last night) to send me Easyjet flight details for a weekend in Italy at 9 am this morning.

When I finished the book last year, I was happy. When I left the cinema last night, I felt happy. Because actually, hearing the story of someone else’s relationship with himself made me feel better about my relationship with myself. Yes, the book is raw and selfish and emotional, but I am all of those things too. And anything that holds up a mirror in this way is commendable, whether it’s from the self-help aisle or not.