The Part I Remember from Eat, Pray, Love

Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat, Pray, Love delivered an insight, second-hand from “Deborah the psychologist”.

I remember a story my friend Deborah the psychologist told me once. Back in the 1980s, she was asked by the city of Philadelphia if she could volunteer to offer psychological counseling to a group of Cambodian refugees—boat people—who had recently arrived in the city. Deborah is an exceptional psychologist, but she was terribly daunted by this task. These Cambodians suffered the worst of what humans can inflict on each other—genocide, rape, torture, starvation, the murder of their relatives before their eyes, then long years in refugee camps and dangerous boat trips to the West where people died and corpses were fed to sharks—what could Deborah offer these people in terms of help? How could she possibly relate to their suffering?

“But don’t you know,“ Deborah reported to me, “what all these people wanted to talk about, once they could see a counselor?“

It was all: I met this guy when I was living in the refugee camp, and we fell in love. I thought he really loved me, but then we were separated on different boats, and he took up with my cousin. Now he’s married to her, but he says he really loves me, and he keeps calling me, and I know I should tell him to go away, but I still love him and I can’t stop thinking about him. And I don’t know what to do…

This is what we are like.

It wasn’t hard to Google my way to this quote, however I was surprised that there was only one source for it. The website I got it from also has this post We Are All Sociopaths (For Love). Eat, Pray, Love sold over 10 million copies, and yet no one else is talking about this?

A model of fallible human behavior emerges:

a) buys more of a good when the price goes down
b) occasionally blinded by rage
c) risk-averse, except at casinos or with dodgy crypto products
d) present biased
e) bought cargo shorts in 2003, which cannot be explained by features a through d
f) “Because here is something I know for certain about myself, as I near the age of forty. I can no longer do infatuation. It kills me. In the end, it always puts me through the wood chipper.” (Gilbert, Committed, 2011)

Eat, Pray, Love is kind of ridiculous. E.G. displays self-awareness by sharing a normal person’s reaction to her story, in her later book Committed.

On the surface, I will admit, our love story did seem awfully romantic as it was unfolding. For pity’s sake, we met on the tropical island of Bali… At the time, I remember describing this whole dreamy scene in an e-mail that I sent to my older sister back in the suburbs of Philadelphia. In retrospect, this was probably unfair of me. Catherine–at home with two little kids and facing down a massive house renovation–replied only, “Yeah, I was planning to go to a tropical island this weekend with my Brazilian lover, too . . . but then there was all that traffic.”