My mom read this book and sent it to me because she thought I’d like it and she also wanted to know my thoughts on it.? You hear all these glowing reviews from all the newspapers and from people who feel like this book has changed their lives. Those are pretty much two reasons not to read a book, in my humble opinion, so it went on my TBR pile until I got a break in Harry Potter stuff. (Book 7 is kind of hard to read when you’re pregnant and depressed.)
I’m about 2/3 of the way through right now (she’s leaving India) and I’m feeling just slightly less inclined to slap really hard than I was when I started the book. The reviews talk about her “painful divorce”… which resulted when the idiot decided she didn’t like her life and abandoned her husband The bitter divorce happens because she was too self-centered to actually *try* and fix her marriage and I dunno… maybe TALK to her husband about the fact that she did not want to be an SAHM with kids? I have absolutely no sympathy for her whatsoever and I don’t blame her husband one bit for not wanting to forgive her. Her other “relationships” with men after she ends her marriage are trainwrecks and I just want to shake her and ask her why she is so stupid that she thinks that sleeping with other men is going to solve her problems.
Anyway… because she’s a privileged person, she gets a book advance (for this book actually) that enables her to spend a year traveling around. She spends 4 months in Italy eating herself sick, 4 months in India at her Guru’s ashram (which remains nameless because apparently she doesn’t want to SHARE the name of her Guru with her readers), and 4 months in Indonesia. In Italy, she muses about whether or not she should sleep with her conversation partner. (She doesn’t, which seems like the one good decision she has ever made in her life.) In India, the people at the ashram are telling her that she needs to let go already (!!!!!!!) of her past and move on. As I said, I’m just to the part where she is leaving India so I can’t tell you anything about her adventures in Indonesia though I’m sure we’ll find more of her self-absorbed nature and “spiritual narcissism” (as one Amazon.Com reviewer so poignantly puts it). I’m honestly only finishing it so I can talk about it with Mom at Christmas.
Her spirituality is even self-absorbed. She talks about how all religions lead to the same place and how all she wants to do is find God. (Hello? John 14:6, much?) I guess her prayer times just suck at the beginning of her stay in India and I just want to bang her head against a wall because she somehow thinks that she is so special that meditation and prayer should come easily to her. She honestly sounds like a New York yuppie through all of this and not someone genuinely looking for a change. It’s only when she lets go of all her crap that she actually gets anywhere in her prayer and meditation. I’m not just expressing my righteous indignation as someone who despises syncretism — I’m expressing it as someone who is so sick of the whole “mememememememememe!!!!” type of spirituality that seems to be pervasive in society.
Conclusion: I can’t understand why anyone with morals and a brain would find this book “inspirational”. Seriously, I’m more inclined to agree with the Amazon.Com reviewers who completely panned the book. Those who found it to be the best book ever sound like they’re probably SUV-driving yuppies who flip out if their soy lattes aren’t perfect when they stop at their local $tarbuck$ after yoga class — people who honestly make me fear the direction in which our country is going.
