Eat.Pray. Love.

I tried. I really did. I tried to read the book, but could not get into it. The writing style just didn't really grab me. And a book has to grab me in the first chapter or two or I just won't waste my time reading any further.

So, tonight I went to see the movie by the same name tonight at the cute little theatre in the shopping center a mere block away from my house. I thought perhaps this book might be one of those books that makes a better movie than it does a book, but I was wrong.

The movie didn't grab me either. The story seemed at best self-indulgent. The same kind of self-indulgence many of us went through in our twenties, ie, trying to figure yourself out. Self-indulgence is expected in the young. Finding yourself. Traveling to exotic places. Taking risks, like rock-climbing and sky-diving and bungy-jumping. Climbing mountains in the Himalayas. Very twenty-something activities, before you get serious about the "important" and serious things in life, like career, marriage and family.

So why does an over 40 year old female, without children, leave her husband and go off to other countries in order to "find herself"? To Italy to "eat" pasta and pizza, to India for mediation with a "guru" she knows absolutely nothing about, and then to Bali, to see a fortune teller who reads her palm. She could have done all of this without leaving the United States. We have excellent pasta and pizza in any Italian neighborhood in New York City; mediation centers exist even in suburbia; we have people who will read your palm on any street corner in any major city. Why could she not have "found herself" here in the good old USA?

I just don't get it.