A Memoir ~ 4.1 out of 5 Stars
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I think I've read this book before, or maybe I'm just confusing the book with the Julia Roberts movie. The only way I'll be able to prove it is if I get up into my loft and search through my physical books, and that ain't happening any time soon. Well, unless a miracle occurs and my dreams of a writers nook, complete with all my books magically appears.
Eat Pray Love is the oldest of the seven potential comparative titles I currently have on my TBR (to be read) list. I'm 42,000 words into my first ever manuscript, only 48,000 odd words left to go. Hmmmmm, she's one hell of a long journey, this 'writing-a-book' thing! I suspect it will take me even longer if I keep on prioritising these blogs over getting more words down on my manuscript pages. Gah!
I did question my logic for reading such an old book (published 2006) because I am of the understanding that comparative titles should be recent novels. Because this tells the agent you're hip and happening and up with the play in the literary industry and of course your book's targeted commercial genre. It's also important to offer up recent releases as this gives them more of a chance to take a stab in the dark at forecasting potential sales for your baby, er manuscript. That is, if you actually have a manuscript that bears some semblance to the comparative titles you are offering up in your Query letter. But I decided 'Eat Pray Love' was still worthy of sitting on my Comparative Titles Analysis goodreads shelf because it's an iconic, absolute raving success of a book! I mean it's sold over 15 Million copies. The Author, Elizabeth Gilbert made roughly $10M from this book, with another cool Mil in the bank for the movie rights. She's now worth $20M - according to the internet. So even though this book is old, and a memoir (not technically a romance) I think it's edging towards my comparative titles 'yes list'. Or perhaps I am just hopeful (I am by the way) that I could one day write something like this book that is so influential, so relevant that it affects (and reflects) a generation of women. And I this book did, and does. On the topic of genre, it's not a romance, it's a memoir. Yes, yes I know that's problematic in terms of why I am reading it! But as Publishers Weekly put it, "Gilbert grafts the structure of romantic fiction upon the inquiries of reporting in this sprawling yet methodical travelogue of soul-searching and self-discovery." And it is sprawling yet expertly structured in my humble unpublished opinion. The book is sliced into three sections (Three acts anyone?), each with 36 stories, totaling 108, which (not at all accidentally) is a number of beads threaded into a mala - sanskrit for garland or impurity - that the Indonesians use for a specific type of meditation called japa - the mantra-chanting type.
I did give it a lower rating than Mhairi MacFarlane's 'If I Never Met You'. Only 0.4 of a point mind you! I'm sure that probably indicates my low-brow love of the escape that typical, easy going, romance novels affords. But being completely honest, as much as l loved Gilbert's soiree into all things enlightened and spiritual. And as much as I swooned over her writing ability - I still prefer and enjoy reading fictional romance stories. And I know for a fact (based on the number of Romance novels out there) I am definitely not alone. Romance offers a flow and also maybe the promise of perhaps a little more than what real life can offer. Or maybe it's the promise of a little less than what real life offers? I do live by the motto that less is more, except when I write (but you can probably tell that from my blog). Yeah my rambling writing is a problem. Editing my manuscript will be super fun - that's sarcasm BTW.
Theme
One woman's search for everything, and almost more importantly (once found), the acquiring of balance of the aforementioned 'Everything'.
This story is told in supremely organised categories of three:
Pleasure, Devotion, Balance
Italy, India and Indonesia
Eat, Pray, Love
"...liberated from the farce of pretending to be anyone other than myself."
Conflict
The other day I read somewhere, that aspiring authors (such as myself) need to understand who our reader is. Below the advice of 'Know thy reader' the article included some researched, proven facts about romance readers. One particular fact stuck with me. 80% of Romance readers are female, and that group predominantly identify has feminists. So a large portion of romance readers are advocates of women's rights on the basis of the equality of the sexes. Gilbert (or the smart publisher that took on her manuscript) knew exactly who the target reader was.
I believe there is a bunch of women out there (just like me) pinned between two walls that are shifting ever closer and closer together. Picture the Star Wars spaceship trash compactor scene. Women today are confronted with two conflicting pressures; we live between two walls, one to the right and one to the left. The wall to the right holds societal ideals of what a woman is required to be. The wall to the left applies hope; quiet, powerful, wild, natural, intention. Gilbert calls this force the oak tree in the book. This wall dangles a fantastical destiny of freedom in front of the suffering, starving souls of today's women. Women bound by the left wall's downward force. We slurp this idea of freedom up like collagen in our coffee. But as we drink, we're unaware of the conservative wall to the right, just out-of-sight. An ominous threat, slowly coming to squeeze us to death. Wow, that got serious super quick!
Stuck between two opposing walls, this is pretty much the scene where we meet our 36 year old protagonist. It's well past midnight, she's wide awake with anxiety, sobbing in her bathroom. She doesn't want to be married anymore. But it's more than just the marriage. We meet Liz at her own personal epiphany: surprised and confused to find herself pinned by the wall to the right. She'd been longingly staring in the opposite direction (at the wild, freedom of the left-hand wall). She hadn't dared touch it, but she dreamt of the adventure, sanctuary and peace it offered. She doesn't want any part the life she has realised she's been coerced into, a life she acknowledges she actively participated in creating. See that's the irony of the situation, she can't believe she got herself to this point of utter abhorrence. But really it wasn't her doing at all. Not that Gilbert unpacks this concept, the idea that the system was the driving force. Society told Liz the life she should want, society crammed it down her throat like a foie gras farmer. A life and identity that conflicts so deeply with her intuition - her future self. She doesn't want to have a baby, she doesn't want to live, or clean for that matter, the big house her and her husband recently bought, she is physically opposed to settling down. It's like her body is rejecting this life like an organ transplant gone bad.
But she can't, for the life of her, figure out why she was so unhappy. Because she has done everything she's suppose to do. Everything society asked of her. It's because, while pinned by the oppressive right wall, she cannot see it, and more importantly she does not realise she is the closest she has ever been to freedom - the left wall out of sight, applying equal amounts of pressure from behind.
I like this idea, that the pressure and force of the right, has the unintended consequence of bringing the left wall of freedom close enough to attain. For every action (i.e. society conditioning) there is a reaction (rebellion).
Nearing the end of the book Gilbert connects the dots backwards. "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Steve Jobs." At the ripe age of 44 I feel like I can say with some level of credibility that this really is the only way we humans can make sense of our lives, and figure out what we are or were being willed to do and/or become. You can only look backwards and connect your dots of experience, pain, joy, love.
Gilbert refers to her untransformed self as an acorn seed. I just love the concept she goes on to deliver - I. Just. Friken. Love It! She ponders the idea that we each have two selves, two versions of ourselves that exist simultaneously but in parallel dimensions. The person we become (who exists in the future) is conscious of the person we are now in the present (the acorn). Our future self looks over us, willing us to grow and change and become who they know we can be, who they are.
This is the tieback that Gilbert uses at the end of the book. She's with her new man, oh yes shock horror there's a HEA Happily Ever After ending. She's about to jump out of a long boat and set foot on a lightly populated, isolated but picturesque Indonesian island trimmed with soft white sand and palms, when she figures out the voice she had heard that lonely night, years earlier as she sobbed in the bathroom (unconsciously mourning the future loss of the life she had built but didn't actually want) was actually her very own, future self. It told her to go back to bed and get some sleep, because transformed Liz, big, strong oak tree Liz rationalises, that acorn Liz will need sleep if she is going to grow into her massive potential.
"And maybe it was this present and fully actualized me who was hovering four years ago over that young married sobbing girl on the bathroom floor, and maybe it was this me who whispered lovingly into that desperate girl’s ear, “Go back to bed, Liz . . .” Knowing already that everything would be OK, that everything would eventually bring us together here."
Our future self is the intuition our current self needs to tune into, in order to reach our rightful destiny. Gilbert comes the conclusion that she was willed to grow (like a seed is willed to grow) by her future-self (by the oak tree that doesn't yet exist in the acorn's dimension, but exists in it's own dimension and therefore knows it will be again in the acorn's dimension). How cool is that idea? Pretty cool I reckon - so cool in fact I completely understand why this book was such a massive success. So cool in fact that I feel like a dick only giving is 4.1 stars - who am I to judge a book that sold 15 million copies. Really?
The thing I love about books like this is that it makes you reflect on your own life. They make you think. During Liz's phase of breaking apart the life society had encouraged, nay manipulated her into believing she wanted, she writes;
"The fact that this was a fairly accurate portrait of my own mother is a quick indicator of how difficult it once was for me to tell the difference between myself and the powerful woman who had raised me."
This made me think of my own mother, who I have just lost recently. I loved my Mother, she was 5.2 but also the tallest oak tree I think I will ever have the fortune of knowing. My mother was a force and I hadn't realised how much of a force until very recently. And only in death have I come to some pretty sobering realisations. I knew my Mother's parents died young, neither making it past 55 years. My Mother lived for 74 years. I hadn't appreciated how much my Mother's parents early deaths had impacted her, but they had. My Mother was hyper sensitive about time. There was never time to waste. She walked with purpose and pace, everywhere. She walked like she knew she didn't have time to waste, and when you look at her genetics, yeah, fair call Mum, I wouldn't have wasted a minute either if I thought I was going to die at 55. But her pace impacted me and my siblings. It wasn't good or bad, for me I think it was confusion for a long period of my life. Why do we need to rush? Why do we always need to be efficient. I'm only now realising the value of stillness.
"Why must everything always have a practical application?"
If she was still here I think my Mother would answer like this. "Oh my daughter, it doesn't it matter now, does it? Because you figured out by yourself, didn't you? You figured out that by slowing down, by doing the exact opposite of what I was doing, you end up getting more time. I'm so proud of you for figuring it out."
Favourite Quotes
Gilbert is a supreme writer, with skills I could only wish I had. Here are some of my favourite bits... On the conflict:
"The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving."
"Is this lifetime supposed to be only about duty?"
"...even though my life still looked like a multi-vehicle accident on the New Jersey Turnpike during holiday traffic—I was tottering on the brink of becoming a self-governing individual."
"Our relationship now thoroughly ruined, with even civility destroyed between us, all I wanted anymore was the door."
"I became a student of my own depressed experience, trying to unthread its causes. What was the root of all this despair? Was it psychological? (Mom and Dad’s fault?) Was it just temporal, a “bad time” in my life? (When the divorce ends, will the depression end with it?) Was it genetic? (Melancholy, called by many names, has run through my family for generations, along with its sad bride, Alcoholism.) Was it cultural? (Is this just the fallout of a post-feminist American career girl trying to find balance in an increasingly stressful and alienating urban world?) Was it astrological? (Am I so sad because I’m a thin-skinned Cancer whose major signs are all ruled by unstable Gemini?) Was it artistic? (Don’t creative people always suffer from depression because we’re so supersensitive and special?) Was it evolutionary? (Do I carry in me the residual panic that comes after millennia of my species’ attempting to survive a brutal world?) Was it karmic? (Are all these spasms of grief just the consequences of bad behavior in previous lifetimes, the last obstacles before liberation?) Was it hormonal? Dietary? Philosophical? Seasonal? Environmental? Was I tapping into a universal yearning for God? Did I have a chemical imbalance? Or did I just need to get laid?"
Character Arc:
FROM:
"Depression even confiscates my identity; but he always does that."
"When you’re lost in those woods, it sometimes takes you a while to realize that you are lost."
"I instead felt my soul rise diaphanous in the wake of that chanting. I walked home that night feeling like the air could move through me, like I was clean linen fluttering on a clothes-line, like New York itself had become a city made of rice paper—and I was light enough to run across every rooftop."
"I wanted worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence—the dual glories of a human life."
"My face is a transparent transmitter of my every thought." - So is mine Liz, alas. So is mine.
"From the center of my life, there came a great fountain . . .”
"I could finally sleep. And this was the real gift, because when you cannot sleep, you cannot get yourself out of the ditch—there’s not a chance." TO:
"I knew that I needed to do this and that I needed to do it alone." "Yet what keeps me from dissolving right now into a complete fairy-tale shimmer is this solid truth, a truth which has veritably built my bones over the last few years—I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue." "I also knew somehow that this respite of peace would be temporary. I knew that I was not yet finished for good, that my anger, my sadness and my shame would all creep back eventually, escaping my heart, and occupying my head once more. I knew that I would have to keep dealing with these thoughts again and again until I slowly and determinedly changed my whole life. And that this would be difficult and exhausting to do. But my heart said to my mind in the dark silence of that beach: “I love you, I will never leave you, I will always take care of you.” That promise floated up out of my heart and I caught it in my mouth and held it there, tasting it as I left the beach and walked back to the little shack where I was staying. I found an empty notebook, opened it up to the first page—and only then did I open my mouth and speak those words into the air, letting them free. I let those
words break my silence and then I allowed my pencil to document their colossal statement onto the page: “I love you, I will never leave you, I will always take care of you.” Those were the first words I ever wrote in that private notebook of mine, which I would carry with me from that moment forth, turning back to it many times over the next two years, always asking for help—and always finding it, even when I was most deadly sad or afraid. And that notebook, steeped through with that promise of love, was quite simply the only reason I
survived the next years of my life."
ELEMENT | OF A NOVEL | RATING |
Conflict | The bloodstream of a story, creating Tension, launching Plot and evoking Theme. | 5 / 5 |
Tension | Something ominous, simmering under the surface. Comes to fruition beginning of Act 2 | 3 / 5 |
Plot | A strong plot is centred on one moment. Raising a dramatic question to be answered. | 4 / 5 |
Theme | An important idea woven throughout the story. Links a big idea about our world with the action of the text. | 5 / 5 |
Tone | The mood implied by the Author's word choice. The way the text makes the reader feel. | 3.5 / 5 |
Setting | Relates to the time and place in which the story is told. | 4.5 / 5 |
Characters | Are they unique, three-dimensional, with depth, personality and clear motivations? | 4 / 5 |
Climax | The most exciting part of the story, when the Conflict is resolved. i.e. when the dragon is slayed. | 3 / 5 |
Resolution | The end of the story, occurring after the climax, when we learn what happens to the characters after the conflict is resolved. | 4 / 5 |
TOTAL | | 4.1 / 5 |
Credit to Anna Clemens for the following diagram, showing how the three acts of your novel (i.e. the plot) should focus on certain elements. Start with Characters & Setting (world building) in Act 1, ending in Tension and in turn identifying the conflict. Act 2 leads to the Climax, and eventually in Act 3 there is Resolution of the conflict.
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