Eat, Pray, Love vs. Julie & Julia

A guest post by Greg Freed. You can follow Greg on Twitter.

It seems clear to me that if I’m going to write a column where I disperse creative writing advice, I should first define the aims of my creative writing.

I will start with a negative theology:

1) The primary focus of writing is not money. If your objective is to turn top dollar, plenty of advice exists in the world for you already; you will not find much here. That is not to say that following this advice will not net you money, only that this advice is not oriented to maximizing your writing’s income potential. Your art will bring its own income, though its monetary benefits will never match what you might attain if you sacrifice your art to pop culture.

2) Your concern about your audience’s opinion of you, despite advice you will receive to the contrary, must always run second to your concern about artistry, consistency, and purpose. Leave audience-pleasing to the money-mongers. If you sell your individuality, your writing will never achieve the full potential of catharsis or artfulness. Your art itself will call an audience to you, and they will stay loyal even as your talent waxes and wanes, even as it grows and lessens, even as it addresses and if it scalds them directly.

3) Writing is not a platform for preaching. Though a basic knowledge of rhetoric will serve you well, you cannot place your hands upon a story and manipulate it into submission. As with how to write for money, plenty of advice exists in the world already for those who want to write and convince the world of your particular point of view; this column will not teach you that. Maintaining your vision in the face of adversity will bring you its own form of success; force-feeding your audience an agenda that lives separately from you will neither purge your pain nor endear humanity to you.

As Walter Benjamin said of Proust, your writing should express a frenzied quest for happiness. In this way, a writer collects and displays data about what it means to be human in a way that no other artist can; we express our conscious and unconscious mind through our words, a display that takes a generally unrecognized amount of courage to maintain.

We are the Tycho Brahe’s of the human spirit, recording in seemingly mundane detail the movements of humanity over the course of time so that any person who has a desire to see the dynamo of souls can do so, can analyze as Kepler did, as Newton did, and find the core of humanity and record it in a paradigm new and bright, within the scope of history.

We are the workhorse from which a new psychology can be born, and our highest calling is to be true to what we see, to be true to our understanding of and experience with the world so that when all writing is collected and laid down side by side in a threadbare monumental quilt, some genius can find the rhythmic heartbeat of our vast leviathan and say “That is human.” And the world will change.

Our records show the thesis, antithesis, synthesis projections of our mind, but the very nature of our struggle, each of our individual struggles, works against any ambition we might have to be the genius of the next psychology. Our lives and the lives of those we know are the trees that comprise the dark wood; our lights that illuminate our paths are the will-o-wisps that lead others astray. It is in this capacity—in that we lead people astray—that I wish to discuss with you the balance between artistic choices in style and reader assumptions.

Enter Eat, Pray, Love
Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love shows the fulfillment and falling short of promise that every worthwhile human endeavor will evidence. On the one hand, she shows brazenly and without overmuch fear of retribution a frenzied quest for happiness.

She discusses her despair in terms of monogamy and loneliness in a way that some consider whiney and childish while others shout in surprise, “You discuss my own heartache perfectly!”

What better reception can any piece of art have? After all, we can never hope for unanimous approval until we’re considered “great,” and none of us can afford to wait that long before we create.

In my estimation, two errors permeate Gilbert’s work that detract from it as a piece overall (or contribute to its humanistic beauty, depending on which school of art criticism you adhere to).

1. The first error exists as her agenda: that is, to sell Buddhism as a path to happiness. Even while she mentions Christian mystics and their descriptions of communing with the divine—the bright blue light and the fear of overwhelming presence—Christianity itself is dismissed in favor of Buddhism.

The problem therein is not that I’m a Christian who disagrees with her rejection; I have also rejected Christianity as a unique path to happiness capable of denying other religions. However, Buddhism cannot (perhaps would not) claim to have brought more people to happiness than religions of similar caliber, and it seems to me out of turn to dismiss a religion whose mystics provided enough material for Gilbert to mine for her own work.

Elizabeth Gilbert goes about selling Buddhism as a unique path to happiness without systematically closing out other religions, though she does dismiss at least Christianity as an answer. Therefore, agenda had a place in Eat, Pray, Love and distanced me, and probably a few other readers, from her work.

2. The second error falls outside of her control but becomes obvious with the briefest of views at the feedback she has received from readers. She describes her pursuit of happiness (and its finding, if you believe her tale), and several of her fans set out not just on a similar adventure—one that would take them outside of their comfort zones and teach them about cultures outside of their native one—but on the exact same adventure.

The question that addresses this error is simple: What part did Neapolitan pizza have on Gilbert’s pursuit and eventual discovery? Did it have purpose outside of its minor part in her pleasing her body in Italy? Insofar as it had a role in pleasing her body, do you, dear reader, suppose that it simply had to be Neapolitan pizza? Could I propose that a deep delving into curry could have the same body-pleasing effect as Gilbert’s delving into Italian cuisine?

I, at least, am convinced that any experience she had along the way, including what pizza she ate in Italy, was accidental, in that she could have had any number of similar experiences in any other culture. The fact that she was in Italy eating pizza is reported in Eat, Pray, Love as part of her pursuit of happiness, but there’s no correlation to this pizza being essential in your pursuit of happiness.

But a few readers did take her report this way; they sought out the exact eateries she described, the exact hotels, and perhaps they might have even sought out the exact people if she had given her readers enough information to find them.

In her defense, she did have a least two moments where she particularly worked against this misreading. In one instance, she refused to give the name of her ashram in order to save them
from the publicity that might have overwhelmed them. Second, and more direct, she paraphrased the Bhagavad Gita, saying, “it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else’s life with perfection.” (pg 95)

For the first error, I would have asked her to revisit her assumptions about Christianity in order to make sure that she was saying what she meant to, or if we had had the time, I might have taken her for drinks and discussed this humanitarian topic, but in the end it’s her opinion in her book and should be preserved in its own right.

There’s nothing for the second error, however. It is beyond the writer’s responsibility to foresee each reader’s response, and it’s simply bad reading to attempt to co-opt the writer’s story as one’s own.

No stories require blind attachment to fact; not one of the three primary genres requires it. Readers give fiction a broad range of freedom on this matter, with the assumption that fiction is bound only by the imagination, if that. Nonfiction and poetry, however, often receive more scrutiny.

How far, for example, should a reader take the assumption of “nonfiction”? Is the dialog a transcript of actual transpired events? Did the scene really happen on a cold, rainy night, or is that a cheap dramatic element?

And poets I almost pity, since their work is so emotion laden that poor readers often wonder whether they’re bipolar simply because the poet chooses to paint in neons instead of pastels. Is the author suicidal because she mentioned her wrists in this piece about love? Does the blackness here really haunt her every second of every day, as the piece says it does, such that we should be concerned for her emotional stability?

Well, maybe, but no, probably not. A reader so subjectively connected to what he is reading will necessarily miss the point of the artwork in preference of the author’s psychological makeup, which is so skewed by the artwork that he can’t possibly hope to understand the author except thematically. But he assumes he can and so misreads the work.

So, too, the readers of Eat, Pray, Love who hunt Elizabeth’s places as if they were sacristies. Writers, do not concern yourself with this special type of fool; they have their own lives to lead, and their reaction to your work will develop them in its own way without your consent.

Perhaps a new perspective: Julie & Julia
A book-based movie I’m interested in seeing that may highlight this particular conundrum is Julie & Julia. The premise, as I’ve caught from commercials, is that Julie decides to blog about her attempt at following Julia’s journey into commercial success and, presumably, happiness. Julie doesn’t go to France and learn to cook at Le Cordon Bleu, a decision I might have sneered at; instead, she decides to cook recipes from Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

I’ve heard great reviews of both performances and would be interested in your reaction to how the movie does or does not meet up to this writing error of reproducing a pursuit of happiness rather than evidencing a personal (and frenzied) pursuit.

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In addition to being a TJCC contributor, Greg Freed keeps himself busy by freelance editing, writing and marketing a creative writing ezine/blog, and co-creating publishing imprints (okay, it’s just one under the aegis of another press, but still…).

He also studies at Emerson College, pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing. Greg spends an inordinant amount of time at cafes and enjoys meeting random strangers when he should be studying or working.

You can read Greg’s other articles on TJCC here.

Tagged as: Book Reviews, Films, Greg Freed, Writing