All the way to the river

Australia, winter 2025.

For twenty years I walked in a big circle around every edition of Eat Pray Love (and there are a few) I saw in bookshops and opportunity shops and give away mini-libraries and now there is a follow up and I want to read that, thanks to a blinder review in the New Yorker by Jia Tolentino (archive).

This is not just a review, it is a delicious, spine-tingling dissection of the work of “a particular sort of narrator: always freshly emerging from a dark wood, breathless with revelation that may or may not stick” and the also “breathless having-just-finally-realized tone that dizzying numbers of women who narrate their lives on the internet have adopted”, by a dazzling writer, perfectly positioned to write it having been born in 1988 of ‘parents from the Philippines who moved to Houston, Texas, when she was four, and growing up in a southern Baptist community, attending an evangelical megachurch and a small Christian private school’ (wp), who published Trick Mirror: Reflections on self-delusion, a collection of essays, in 2019.

“Gilbert may be patient zero for the latter-day memoirist mind-set: so many women — and I would never exclude myself — have come to believe, at some level, that they, too, are Elizabeth Gilberts, people who search hard and love harder, whose personal journeys can and should captivate millions.”

“Many among us,” Tolentino writes, “after observing this cringe-inducing side effect of regular self-narration at mass scale, have given up altogether on sincere ideas of personal epiphany.”

Indeed. But what if you’ve just sincerely experienced a Huge Personal Epiphany?

(…)

It helps, of course, that Gilbert is someone “who could, in under thirty seconds, locate transcendent human insight in a nuclear-waste dump.”

Well how about that? The entire world anno 2025, not to mention my so-called life and my mind, are a fucking nuclear-waste dump. So, perfect timing. I wonder if it will hit the spot with the book buying public, what’s left of it.

…

A significant portion of the book details the trajectory of being in love (‘affair’ doesn’t seem appropriate here) with someone who has cancer and only six months to live.

We were ecstatic, phosphorescent, dangerous, brilliant, and full of wild courage,” Gilbert writes. “We were writing poems about each other, staying awake just to watch ourselves breathing, and pouring words of devotion back and forth.” They were “divine angels, wrapped together in a single cloak of stars.” Their love was “far more powerful,” Gilbert goes on, than the “mere alcohol, weed, Xanax, psilocybin, sedatives, sleeping pills, and ecstasy.”

Ha. No cocaine?

Gilbert frames it as “a sort of test strip for the universe: take a love affair for the ages, dip it in an unbelievable amount of mutual suffering, and see what color everything turns” (…) and she “begins questioning the nature of existence. Is the universe malicious, or merely indifferent? Or perhaps the cosmos is fundamentally friendly to us, and there is a purpose behind all the hurt that we cause and feel? Gilbert begins “to see this situation as a divinely appointed challenge.”

I am so there.