Eat, Pray, are you kidding me?!

I’m trying to work my way through “Eat, Pray, Love” because my friend, Anna, just read it. She’s as cynical and angry as I am and she assured me that it wasn’t the typical, self-help, Oprah pabulum that has become so popular these days. She did warn me that I may find it a bit of that, but not cloyingly so.

Well, I’m about two dozen pages into it and I know I won’t finish it. Why? It’s not because it isn’t well-written, because it is. It’s not that I can’t relate to what she’s going through, because I can.

What I can’t get past is that this woman, an established writer so I can’t fault her there, took her divorce recovery and rebuilding on the road to Italy, India and Indonesia. She starts the book having coffee with a gorgeous Italian man - who has a gorgeous twin - as they exchange language lessons in Italy. Yeah, I do that every Thursday.

She spent time in an ashram with an amazing guru. I’m sure there are many other wondrous and vivid adventures she had while she took her recovery on the road.

You know where my recovery took me?

First, to my friend’s living room for a month while I figured out where I was going to live.

Then to a small bedroom in someone else’s apartment while 90% of my life lived in a storage room across town.

Briefly, I had my own place for four glorious months but my parents basically paid my rent that entire time because I’ve never recovered economically from going from two incomes to one.

Now, I’m living in a tiny bedroom in an apartment that is dominated by parents, as is my life.

Hmmmmm, Italy, gorgeous men, ashram are a long way away from where I am.

She fell in love immediately with a young, studly actor/performer who swept her off her feet.

I fell in love with one of my best friends who never so much as held my hand and now merely tolerates my presence. The only thing she writes about that I can relate to is how she drove the young performer away with her neediness. Hm, that sounds familiar. However, the OOMA was not young and not studly, although I still view him as one of the most incredible men I have ever known. And he’ll always be handsome in my eyes.

While I understand the fairy tale, oh I wish that were me quality of “Eat, Pray, Love”, I just can’t do it.

Most of us don’t have the luxury of taking our divorce/mid-life on the road to these fabulous places. And I realize that she went through exactly the same thing I did and that I will probably find other things that I can relate to if I should manage to struggle through more of it.

But what I’d like to read about is someone like me. Someone who can’t figure out how to pay their bills, who hasn’t had a date since she left her husband in June, 2005. Someone who’s managed to pretty much drive a lot of her friends away. Someone who didn’t find company with young Italian men but spends more of her life in a single room, working towards a dream but finding herself lonely and empty and melancholy so much of the time. Someone who keeps putting one foot in front of the other just because there are no other choices.

It wouldn’t be “Eat, Pray, Love.” It might be “Cry, Battle, Survive.” That I might read.