I Wanna Travel Around the World, Too!

I remember reading the book Eat, Pray, Love a few years ago, and liking it. I don't have a mad crush on it like I do for say, Lolita, but I like it enough, like the way I like a warm fuzzy blanket. My reading tastes tend to be so extreme. I like Edgar Allan Poe, even when he's talking about beating hearts under footboards and walling somebody up in a dungeon, so I sometimes like to cancel it out with the wooly little blankets like The Time Traveler's Wife.

Because of the hype surrounding the movie Eat, Pray, Love, I re-read the book and discovered that I still liked it. It's an adventure book for girls, not unlike the Nancy Drew detective stories of my youth. Nancy Drew was a detective, but she was also a girly-girl. If anything, some of the issues mentioned in the book resonated to me even more now than they did a few years ago, still in my twenties and childless.

So I don't understand the Eat, Pray, Love hate going around. The word >narcissist is being thrown out there a lot. Self-involved too. The author Elizabeth Gilbert has a career that I would kill to have, and she was paid a hefty advance by her publisher to travel around the world, then write about her year abroad to heal from her divorce.

This is an ugly side of the American public that I don't like. Americans take their entertainment pretty seriously, talking about yesterday's episode of Mad Men the next day in the office. Germans are exactly the opposite, and it is no wonder that German TV is the way it is: A 24-hour Discovery Channel special. Any talk about pop culture is considered shallow and embarassing. Many would rather talk about or pretend to like Schiller and Goethe. So when they like a TV show, they LOVE it. They hate it, they HATE it. I swear like a stevedore, but I don't like to throw the words bitch or cunt around, aimed especially at other people. Especially against people I don't know. But there is that word. Liz Gilbert, bitch. narcissist.

Look, there is nothing wrong about thinking about yourself first before helping other people. There are people who are naturally giving, a wellspring of generosity that can be mistaken for being a doormat. But not everybody is like that. I cannot give if I don't have anything to give. Germans sometimes comment on how selfish it is of me to eat first before breastfeeding Antonio, or to send Antonio to a Tagesmutti for seven hours before he's a year old. First of all, none of your business. Second, I need to work because my government money has run out. Third, I need to be around adults again, stat. I like to think of it as the airplane oxygen mask policy. In the event of rapid depressurization, you have to put the mask over yourself first before you assist your neighbor. Giving when you have nothing is mighty noble, but very few people work that way.

As for the book, no, Liz Gilbert is not a narcissist. In fact, she is the opposite. She is a seeker of adventure, curious. I find her highly entertaining, and people who never set foot in a third world country have no idea what it's really like, so they don't have to damn the part of the book where she buys a house for an Indonesian lady. It was a private act of generosity, and since it is a memoir, she had to write about it. Believe me, I know a narcissist when I see it, I used to live with one. It's not like she hurt anybody doing the thing she loves. I think that if she didn't leave her really nice husband, if she had a child even if her inner voice told her don't do it, she would be as unhappy as the closet queen next door, and we don't need another miserable human being in this world because s/he isn't being true to their person. And she would have hurt even more people in the process.