Luxagraf

Travel writer Rolf Potts has a excellent and brutal piece skewering Elizabeth Gilbert’s best-selling travel book, Eat, Pray, Love which a friend of mine described as “the most nauseating, narcissistic, bucket of crap I’ve ever suffered though.” And not that it matters, but yes, my friend was a woman.

The legacy of “adventure porn,” I think, is not the kind of adventure writing you see in Outside magazine, but books like “Eat, Pray, Love.” Instead of wrestling crocodiles in distant lands, our protagonist wrestles despair; instead of exploring rivers, she explores emotions; instead of surviving disease, she survives heartbreak. Men occasionally appear in this survivor’s tale, but they are as one-dimensional as adventure-porn wenches, and mainly serve as a sounding board for the protagonist’s feelings. When these men are giving our heroine love and help, she gushes with admiration; when they can’t intuit her emotional needs, she reacts with despair (and vague contempt). Rarely does she ponder what — besides emotional availability to her — might motivate these men in day-to-day life.

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