Eat, Pray, Vomit: The Fine Line Between Self-Affirmation and Self-Preoccupation in Popular Women’s Travel Writing

This paper considers the contentious space between self-affirmation and self-preoccupation in popular women’s travel writing. The female traveller has recently come under close scrutiny and public suspicion. She is accused of walking a fine line between critical self-insight and obsessive self-importance, and her travel narratives are branded as accounts of navel gazing that are less preoccupied with what is seen than with who is doing the seeing. Following the backlash against Elizabeth Gilbert’s best-selling travel memoir, Eat, Pray, Love (2006), the polar responses to the text from its female readership in particular exemplify this problematic. The memoir, which has been praised by some as the ultimate spiritual guide to balanced living and dismissed by others as self-serving junk, poses questions about the requisites in Western culture for being a female traveller and telling a story that focuses primarily, perhaps even indulgently, on the self