No, I’m not reading the book. Or watching the movie. I have too much to do. But I did read this anthropology blog post about it, and it was interesting.

Gilbert’s quest feels to me a little like the traditional mission of the avant-garde artist. She is keen to discover her real self, the one concealed by a middle class commitment to husbands, babies and suburbs. But it’s not long before we see that she is also a postmodernist. For she is searching not for a single self, but for several of them.

This is a book about eating, praying AND loving. Gilbert seeks her self in Italy, Indian AND Indonesia. Gilbert is tempted along the way to cultivate one of these existential modalities. But no. She refuses to choose…

This is the postmodern voice. When told that one ‘life choice,’ one ‘self choice,’ must cost us the other, the postmodernist says, “I refuse to choose. I will have them both.”

Indeed.