I was having a great conversation with a friend of mine about the phenom of Eat, Pray, Love.  We have both heard praise and vitriol about this book of one woman's spiritual and sensual experiences while traveling.  It has sparked a whole trend in wealthy woman traveling, in Prada and Marc Jacobs, to find spiritual meaning.   M. mentioned that the book was labeled part of the PrivLit genre, and she argued that label was unfair.  If Gilbert was a wealthy traveler, or if she had been given an advance for the book, these facts do not invalidate her experience or make those experiences manufactured lies.  M. also argued that authors of wealth should not be considered other than or unworthy of being listed to simply because they are rich.  It has been several days since our conversation, so I apologize to M. for bastardizing her more eloquently stated thoughts. 

Conversations like this NEVER let me sleep, and I am glad for that.  So I went home thinking about the validity of the PrivLit label.  But I didn't want to do any real research, so I just thought about my own reading of the memoir.  What struck me is that Gilbert writes almost as if she removes herself from her life in the States to embark on a journey in "foreign" places.  This isn't so remarkable. The Romantics thought that "strange" places were beacons of right living and more authentic experiences; they could find themselves in the macabre and in the emotional, the sensual.  They were also colonists.  Hmmm...PrivLit.  But then I justify her writing because she is a woman writing in a romantic time (the present is most definitely romantic in the US).  I mean, Postmodernism has ended and with it the look at the banal.  We are living in a time that wants transcendence.  She is a writer of her time. 

Then I remembered that Gilbert makes this journey after a series of bad relationships, or one bad relationship.  Ah, how many trips have I taken after an especially traumatic romance, how many moves have I accepted after I have chosen a man badly?  Perhaps this is why I love to move so much, though others regard it as the chore they would choose only if death were the other option.  Moving is a sign to my corporeal being that I can start over; it is refreshing.  But I digress.  I have traveled with a need to recover myself before, and this may be why I related to Gilbert's tale.  But how many people get to travel any amount of distance because of heartbreak?  How many people have the resources to take themselves out of their everyday life and live like someone else? How many people get to escape into a world of dreams, scents, yoga, and liminal spaces not part of their own neighborhoods?  I have, in fact, been quite privileged to be able to pack my car for a 4,000 mile trip around the Western US and afford the new radiator I need on the way.  I have been privileged to travel to Western Europe to mark my new beginning as an adult after college.  I have been privileged to move to several states and take several vacations across state lines to see friends (usually connected to another break up).  Hmmm...PrivLit. 

I have worked hard for my life (and my parents have been helpful).  But lots of people work hard, much harder than I work, and they don't get to take off in search of themselves in distant lands, and they don't have parents to bail them out in their late twenties.  They fight their way through self-realization (if they do) in the spaces they inhabit everyday.  They face their lives in the manner they can afford.  And perhaps they are much more courageous for it than I am, who will visit Gothic churches and Gilbert who visited the ashram.