Last week, Julia Roberts appeared on US television to advertise her latest film, an adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert's travel memoir, Eat Pray Love. Roberts, who while shooting the film in India became a Hindu, described it in terms of her character's spiritual journey and "the gamut" of emotions she runs, from divorce and despair to new love and happiness. It's an exciting gambit for the studio, too, which to promote the film's release yesterday in the US (it is out in the UK next month) is offering three Eat Pray Love fragrances in conjunction with Fresh, and tie-in chakra beads from an Los Angeles-based jeweller.
Spiritual journeys are a basic requirement of good story telling, as marketing campaigns are of Hollywood films, so it is churlish get too outraged by Sony Pictures's conflation of the two. As any gap-year returnee with an arm full of string knows, the appeal of eastern philosophy has always come down, in part, to the accessories. "Has Liz Gilbert sold out?" asked various book blogs last week and although the structure of the book, divided into 108 tales after the number of meditation beads in a traditional set, raises certain expectations, Gilbert never claims to be anything more holy than a burnt-out journalist on a year out, trying to put her life back together.
And so she does. The arresting thing is how many people want to follow her. With 5m copies in print and a new edition on the bestseller list, Eat Pray Love and its imitators start to look like primers in wish- fulfilment, sacred rules to a better existence. You know how it goes – the combination of self-indulgence and self-denial which women must navigate in order to feel good about themselves and which, in Gilbert's case, seems to boil down to the following principle: if you go on holiday for a year, eat pasta, sit on a beach and meet a gorgeous Brazilian there's a good chance you'll be "happy", or at least, get a book out of it with a citation on the dust jacket from Minnie Driver. The question is why this has come as such news to us.
It is partly a function of our demanding times – one strand of a broader publishing trend in how to be happy, once thought a by-product of other diversions and now a pursuit in itself. Anything with "happiness" in the title and a set of rules to follow stands a good chance of vaulting into the bestseller lists, from business books (Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose by Tony Hsieh) to Gretchen Rubin's the Happiness Project. If it can be combined with some kind of esoteric activity, all the better, as in Cleaving, Julie Powell's follow up to Julie & Julia, in which she enrolls in butcher's school in upstate New York while trying to figure out what to do with her marriage. Or Yoga School Drop Out, by Lucy Edge, or Frances Mayes's project to renovate an Italian villa in Under the Tuscan Sun. In order to work, the journey at the heart of these books must be presented as a form of rebellion, in opposition to the grinding work culture which threatens to crush our spirits and kill our creativity.
It is also connected to the self-empowerment movement, rooted in gym culture in the US, which appeals to a lucrative demographic of urban women. It is here, perhaps, that the appeal starts to wane. Self-empowerment is an admirable thing and everyone has a right to it. But as with the consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s, one suspects that self-empowerment classes in America today are patronised by women who start from a position of relative advantage. Like people who use the phrase "me-time" (as distinct, one always wonders, from what exactly?) there is something vaguely comic about a room full of Manhattan women – who, if they were any more assertive, could launch a coup d'etat – "empowering" themselves via chants about how great they all are.
Still, everyone deserves a holiday. It's a question of what claims are made for it. Going off to find yourself isn't a new idea and in this age of sophisticated marketing techniques "spiritual journey" is almost a tautology. The film's tagline is Let Yourself Go, or rather, Let Yourself GO, to emphasis the journey aspect and it trades on the promise behind every holiday: that by going somewhere else you will magically resolve all your issues and return a cleaner, better person. This is indicated in the film's poster by a picture of Roberts looking pensive on the end of a bench in Italy, with half a nun sitting at the other end. "Half-nun" could, at this point, be a recognised marketing term.
It's an attractive sell, particularly since the heroic journey has, historically, been a guy thing; specifically one man, a rugged landscape, a dog, possibly a horse and a lot of lingering looks at the horizon. The female equivalent, childbirth, seems poor value when the men get to go on holiday. The Wife of Bath is always brought up at this point as the mother of the picaresque heroine (although today she'd be said to have anger management issues), as well as her modern-day heir, before Gilbert, the heroine of Erica Jong's Fear of Flying. But whereas in 1973, Isadora Wing misbehaved her way around Europe, self-control is now the order of the day.
So: yes to pasta, no to casual sex. Yes to expensive holidays, no to empty materialism. Yes to new experience, no to new shoes. In the new austerity, it is important, even if you spend lots of money getting there, to go to a place where life is simpler. For men, in the 1990s, this impulse was immortalised in the film City Slickers, in which Billy Crystal and his cohorts were taught invaluable life lessons by Jack Palance on a horse. In 2010, for women, it is the yoga, cooking or spiritual guru.
In Gilbert's case, it is Ketut Liyer, a woodcarver and medicine man from Ubud, in Bali, with whom she goes to study. Before the book came out, Liyer was down on his luck, suffering as a result of reduced tourist numbers after the 2002 Bali terrorist bombing. These days there are, according to a recent visitor, never fewer than 20 western women outside his hut, clutching copies of the book. He tends to tell people they are "a very good person", a "very lucky person", in possession of "very good karma" and a husband who is a "very good man". What's not to like? Liyer has quadrupled his prices to $25 (£16) a palm reading and $450 for one of his "magic paintings".
Which brings us to Dogeared, the company behind the Eat Pray Love jewellery line. "We relate," said a spokesman, "to the theme of a woman's journey for self-fulfilment and happiness," which in this case means the "Eat Pray Love 109 wishes prayer turquoise bead necklace" ($152), the "Eat Pray Love beauty is everywhere sterling silver reminder necklace" ($52) and a range called I Deserve Something Beautiful, which includes macramé bracelets, necklaces in the shape of lotus petals, cascade earrings and an "Eat Pray Love meditate sterling silver om bead necklace", which sounds like a meltdown in a Buddhist reading shop. Even the Scientologists could learn a trick or two about selling spirituality from this lot.
In his book The Gift, Lewis Hyde defines the spiritual benefit of giving thus: "I am not concerned with gifts given in spite or fear, nor those gifts we accept out of servility or obligation; my concern is the gift we long for, the gift that, when it comes, speaks commandingly to the soul and irresistibly moves us." I might be wrong, but I don't think he's talking about the Eat Pray Love gold-dipped engraved bangle ($66).
At least in the book, Gilbert is true to Hyde's principle. The emotional denouement is not her meeting her future husband, but having a whip-round of her friends in New York to buy a house for a Balinese woman and her daughter. Eat Pray Love, the book, has other charms. It's smart. It's funny. It's a welcome addition to the genre of one-woman's-journey-to-self-fulfilment via means other than shopping. Unlike some of its copycats, it doesn't feel like a cynical exercise. When Gilbert gets what she wants, she has the decency at least to be smug about it.
If there is disingenuousness, it is in the wide-eyed tone she adopts for the enterprise. When she embarked on her journey, she was not an ingenue but a sophisticated 30-something journalist from Manhattan, well travelled, with three books and a Hollywood film under her belt. It was hard to believe she found the fact that – how insane! How adorable! – all books in Italian bookshops are in Italian, quite so charming. And far from dropping out and letting go, her trip was insured by the fact she had sold a book proposal in advance. Going to an ashram to write about it with guaranteed publication is a wholly different exercise to going with nothing. On her website, she confesses to getting up early in the morning to write. Perhaps that's the appeal – stealth confirmation of the status quo.
The real lesson of Gilbert's salvation isn't let yourself go, but get down to work.
On the path to enlightenment …
A new breed of self-discovery lit coming to a bookshelf near you
Cleaving
By Julie Powell
Embroiled in an extramarital affair and determined to rescue her failing marriage, the author embarks on a butchery course. The resulting book, A Story of Marriage, Meat and Obsession, was published last year, coinciding with the release of Nora Ephron's film adaptation of Powell's first bestseller, Julie & Julia.
The Happiness Project
By Gretchen Rubin
Rubin's subtitle says it all: Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun. The Happiness Project hit the top of the New York Times bestseller list in February.
The Handbag and Wellies Yoga Club
By Lucy Edge
After Yoga School Dropout, which charted an emotional journey through a series of ashrams in India, Edge's latest book, published last year, follows her move to Norfolk. As her publishers promise, the book is 'one woman's search for love and friendship in the lotus position'.
I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti
By Giulia Melucci
Subtitled A Memoir of Good Food and Bad Boyfriends, Melucci's 2009 confessional proved you didn't have to leave home to look for love – or eat pasta.
