Paperback Puppy. Can “Eat Pray Love” Get You Laid?

Maybe women are from Venus, but men are from Earth, and here the only reason we slog through chick-lit is with the distant hope that it will get us laid. So went the thinking of a longtime, hard-up friend of mine, whom I’ll call “John,” even though his real name is Mike Martinez. A few months back, John picked up a copy of Eat Pray Love, thinking it would serve him like a paperback puppy: he’d hold it on his lap and women would mistake him for a sensitive soul. “Dude, you’ve got to try it,” he told me recently. He’d brought the book on a bus, pretended to read it, and a pretty young passenger had smiled at him—the closest John had come to coitus in several years.

But John lives in Boston. I live in the Bay Area, where tense gender politics work like saltpeper on the collective male libido. Try the casual hook-up here, even the hubba-hubba ogle, and the average woman will either fix you with a scowl or light off to Indonesia on a year-long journey of self-discovery. It’s not a happy place.

Lucky for me, I’m married, so sex comes freely to me after hours of begging. But I still like to flirt, a harmless little hobby that reminds me of those long gone days when I was alive. So I bought a copy of Elizabeth Gilbert’s book and took it with me on a train ride into San Francisco. Book, schmook. My presence had the usual repellant impact. I might as well have brought along a sewer rat.To call it a blow to my ego would suggest that I still have any ego left. It was more like a sense of self-validation. I was right. Gender relations around these parts are shitty. And public transit truly sucks.

But I still had the book. When life gives you lemons . . .
I cracked open the first chapter, a tale of our narrator’s Roman flirtation (proof that she’s from the Bay Area: she inflicts a young Italian with a bout of blue balls), followed by a flashback to her own divorce. At the end of the second chapter, we find her lying, supplicant, in the bathroom, having realized that she no longer wants to be married.
What happened next?
“What happened,” Gilbert writes, “was that I started to pray. You know—like, to God.”
Sitting on the train to San Francisco, with nary a woman paying any heed to me, I closed the book, sickened by its slickly packaged earnestness and  just-add-water spirituality.
And what happened was that I wanted to puke.
You know—like, on the floor.

-JOSH