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There was also this: For most of her career pre-Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert wrote to impress men. She wrote for the men’s magazines. Her stories, and also her first novel, were about women trying to make their way in world of men. Two of her first three books had the world “men” or “man” in the title, for God’s sake. (Stern Men and The Last American Man.) She wrote about her adventures in dangerous places. She modeled herself on Hemingway.
And then, she writes at the beginning of Eat, Pray, Love, she has lost her house and most of her money in the aforementioned nasty divorce. So she writes this book proposal for her first piece of sustained writing intended for women. Who, as it happens, constitute the majority of America’s book buyers. Was this a calculated business decision? Or was it more of Gilbert’s good luck? Anyway, this girly book, as she admits in the New York Times Magazine profile, while it earns her gazillions of dollars, completely destroys her literary reputation, because it is not a Serious Book, that is, a book that is admired and respected in man-world. This is a memoir, one that does not concern war or politics or even contain any serious conflict. It’s about eating pasta and doing yoga and finding romance with a charming Brazilian businessman, and how this combination of indulgence and introspection made her a happier, more whole person. The voice is bubbly and girly, and it doesn’t talk to the reader like an equal. Instead, it’s the voice of an astonishingly successful woman pretending she is Just Like You, except that she has had to befriend Serbian war criminals to make her life easier instead of, say, the super in her apartment building. It’s a voice of a person who knows she is better than you are, but is trying really hard not to let it show because that might hurt your feelings.
It’s also extremely difficult to inhabit another world as completely as Gilbert does, without turning her characters into oil paintings. Alma lives and breathes, although most of the novel’s action takes place between 1800 and the 1870s (with a short dip back into her father Henry’s youth in the late 1700s), in the rarefied world of botany when natural philosophers were beginning to give way to scientists. While Eat, Pray, Love‘s subtitle was One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia, The Signature of All Things is, in part, about Alma’s search for a theory of everything. (The title refers to a theory held by a medieval natural philosopher “that God had hidden clues for humanity’s betterment inside the design of every flower, leaf, fruit, and tree on earth.”)
This isn’t a book that was written to impress an audience of powerful manly men who could really help a girl out with her literary career. It wasn’t written to appeal to women seeking enlightenment. (Alma does find enlightenment and contentment, but of a variety that’s particular only to her.) It probably wasn’t even written to be a commercial success, though it probably will be since it has Gilbert’s name attached to it and the words Eat, Pray, Love on the cover. It was written to tell the story of Alma Whittaker. Its pleasures far outweigh those of schadenfreude.
