JAN MOIR: Eat Pray Love is an insult to women with real problems



Hillary Clinton loved it. Elle Macpherson thinks that every woman should read it. Sophie Dahl wants to give a copy of it to all her girlfriends. Ditto Julia Roberts. And so, of course, do I.



However, only if my chums promise to balance the book on their heads to improve their deportment skills. For I wouldn’t want them to suffer. I wouldn’t want them to have to read the darned thing.



Yet more than nine million women have devoured Eat, Pray, Love, the international best-seller by American author Elizabeth Gilbert.



Spiritual leap? The book Eat Pray Love is now a Hollywood film starring Julia Roberts and Javier Bardem

The book has been turned into a Hollywood film (starring Julia Roberts as Gilbert), spawned a greedy, multi-million-pound industry of Eat, Pray, Love merchandise and opened up an entire new tourist trade for 40-something women who have convinced themselves that they, too, are spiritually malnourished and need to follow in Gilbert’s global footsteps.



What can I say? The smash-hit book is Harry Potter for the hairy-chinned daughters of Shirley Valentine; across the world, this new battalion of perimenopausal thrill-seekers is looking for guidance from healers in Bali, eating gelato in Rome and visiting temples in India, just like Elizabeth Gilbert did.



Which is a bit of a joke, considering the whole thing is based on a bit of a fib.



For let us be honest here. Elizabeth did not really take a year out to find herself following divorce and depression.



She took a year out to write a book about finding herself, and there is an enormous emotional difference between those two experiences.



Her's was no brave leap in the spiritual dark. It was an assignment with its own built-in safety barrier and publisher’s cheque already deposited in the bank.



Gilbert was no groundbreaker. Instead, she is just like those correspondents who report from conflict zones; they can hear the gunfire, they sometimes get shot, but they are not a part of the real war.



Tortuous journey: Julia Roberts, who plays the book's author, attends the Eat Pray Love UK premiere at the Empire Leicester Square

So why is Eat, Pray, Love so popular despite this chicanery? Perhaps because it taps into a deeper malaise, some level of inchoate female unhappiness that is not often addressed in the mainstream.



Perhaps the secret of its success is not Gilbert’s journey, but that she managed to run away from her life.



Or perhaps it is popular for the same reason I always believed the film Ghost was so popular with women: because the husband snuffs it in the opening scenes. You can see the appeal for Mrs Clinton.



First published four years ago, Eat, Pray, Love charts Gilbert’s tortuous journey to find herself following divorce.



Is that it? Big deal! At the time she was 31 years old, with six years of marriage and no children behind her. In such circumstances, most women would count their blessings, keep calm and carry on, but not our heroine.



Gilbert is the kind of indulged, privileged, self-obsessed, professional, middle-class woman whose entire focus is always inwards in despair, never outwards in hope.



In the end, she is healed not by some great mental revelation, but by having sex with the first bloke who asks her. He happens to be some old dude called Felipe (played by Javier Bardem in the film) who exports Indonesian trinkets.



And basically, that’s the sum of it. On one hand, I agree that few problems in life could not be solved by a thrash under the mosquito nets with Javier Bardem.



On the other, Gilbert turns out to be not much more than Bridget Jones for the Peter Jones generation, only not as entertaining or culturally incisive.



It is hard to decide which is worse - the film or the book. Both are pretty dreadful.



Rarely do author or director rise above the level of New World refugees goggling at the texture, the richness, the amusing otherness of the Disneyland that starts where American borders end.



Someone nearly dies after foraging for mushrooms and then eating the wrong one. Twiggy is modelling Marks & Sparks cardis. There are, yes, interesting programmes on TV. And the weathermen say ‘that’s it!’ for warm weather this year. Something tells me autumn is here. And winter isn’t far away.

Not to mention the wacky locals who live there. Indeed, it is so patronising in places that Italian critics have complained that the film reinforces tired, cultural stereotypes.



La Repubblica moaned that ‘it rains spaghetti, the Italians are always gesticulating and following foreign girls shouting vulgarities. And there’s lots of pizza’.



In an Indian ashram, Gilbert pals up with a Texan called Richard, the kind of spiritual bar bore you would run across a continent to avoid. (‘Select your thoughts the way you select your clothes.’)



You know, ashrams across the world are stuffed full of wealthy women like Elizabeth Gilbert, dressing up some misfire of social abilities or lack of dinner dates in their life as some great spiritual crisis.



The sad thing about Eat, Pray, Love is that it does not - as it so fondly imagines - strike a blow for female independence.



On the contrary, it seems to suggest that women cannot be happy without a man.



Basically, it’s just a long, smug search for a boyfriend. Indeed, Gilbert admits she has no boundary issues with men; she loses all reason when one is on the scene.



‘I disappear into the person I love,’ she writes.



In the end, it is difficult to understand what she is running from, or even towards. More than that, it is insulting to real women with real problems.



For them, there can be no solace in an Eat, Pray, Love candle, soap holder, prayer mat, herb teabag or set of worry beads. Even if they are available in a shop near you soon.



GET OVER IT, MOTORMOUTH On his breakfast show this week, BBC Radio 1 DJ Chris Moyles moaned - at length - about his pay arrangements with the BBC.



That must have been a thrill for those listeners who are struggling with mortgages, the minimum wage, unemployment, their pensions and general ­economic cutback money worries.



‘Go on,’ Chris, they must have thought over their first coffee. ‘Tell us some more.’



Friends have rushed to defend Moyles’s outburst, saying that he is out of sorts and upset over the end of a relationship. He is a professional broadcaster. Why can’t he get over it, on air at least - and himself?



I do hope the next time he goes into a restaurant, the waiter berates him for at least 20 minutes about the iniquities of the ­tipping system and how his ­holiday entitlement is unfair. Then he will know what it feels like.





LYNN, MINISTER FOR INANE SOUNDBITES

More daft waffle from Lynn Featherstone, the Lib Dem minister for Equalities. She is the kind of politician who cannot talk about any ­serious issue without dragging in a celebrity name to bolster her case - a clear sign of lack of substance, not to mention stupidity.

This week, she has claimed that progress will be made on this front only when Jeremy Clarkson attends equality classes.

Eh? What has that got to do with anything? What meaning does it have for women?

No one cares about Jeremy Clarkson except teenage petrol heads and mid-life-crisis men.

Including him in her arguments is almost as meaningless as her remarks about curvy actress Christina Hendricks being the ultimate role model for women.

Yet, to this end, Featherstone now wants to have a government round table on body image.

Or is that a government body table on round image?

When dealing with this mistress of the inane soundbite, it is hard to keep up with what she really means - if anything.

Despite her obsession with the media, she chickened out of appearing on Newsnight this week to put forward her case.

So instead, we had Conservative MP Nadine Dorries and Labour MP Angela Eagle discussing equality in her absence - a head to head which ended in an unseemly screechfest and shouting match.

Well done all round, girls. Together, we are really moving forward on the equality agenda.





