the good, the bad & the ugly
Last night in New York,
Time magazine hosted a reception honoring its self-selected 100 Most Influential people of the year and, I have to say, the women in attendance were a cool bunch: Arianna Huffington, Martha Stewart, Angelica Huston, Wendy Kopp, Tina Fey, Madeeha Hasan Odhaib, Elizabeth Gilbert, and others. And since today's my last day as a full-time Jezebel, I've decided to focus less on the clothes and more on what they've
accomplished. On the whole, these are women sans stylists: They're all Good in my book! (Though Wendi Deng's dress is a little unforgivable.)
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eat, pray, loathe
This is Holly Corbett, photographed here for yesterday's
Page Six Magazine. She read the book
Eat, Pray Love — and it ruined her life! After Elizabeth Gilbert's bestseller about soothing her malaise in Italy, Indonesia and India inspired Holly to take a year off, she bought a round-the-world ticket — and came back to "depression, a breakup, and $10,000 of debt."
You mean a bestselling Oprah-endorsed self-help regimen didn't save her life? Amazingly, claims the title: "My year-long trip changed my life — FOR THE WORSE." How could it be? As you may know,
we read Eat, Pray, Love — but based on Holly's experience, we're wondering if Holly did. After the jump we'll explain some places we think Holly went wrong — besides this mystifying choice of trench coat!
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jezenomics
Today's
WSJ has a
story that explains in painstaking detail how
Eat, Pray, Love became the most popular book we ever
hated ourselves for loving, despite so-so hardcover sales. In the event you haven't read it, it's a memoir of a person who gets very rich when Disney buys her personal essay as the basis for the movie
Coyote Ugly, only to have some weird existential crisis and leave town. "Although her plans were uncertain, she knew she wanted to learn Italian, meditate at her guru's temple in India and spend time with a healer in Bali." Anyway, this plan made her even richer because: the resultant book was chick lit, but it wasn't set in Manhattan, and chick lit not set in Manhattan is the sort of the new chick lit set in Manhattan. And, there were ads in places as unlikely as
Yoga Journal, an
O excerpt, the usual promotional clusterfuck. Also the writer, Elizabeth Gilbert, is really pretty and nice and when she shows up at readings people swoon and want to buy a book just so she'll sign one. Which brings us to a major overlooked factor in the book's success.
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drink, cry, puke
Eat, Pray, Love is the best book you'll ever feel embarrassed buying, or embarrassed liking, or vaguely annoyed you were once manipulated into identifying with, which is how I felt after talking to my friend Stephanie about it. Why's it the number one bestselling nonfiction title in the country right now? Because most women are not the hardened cynics we are, and even those who are, get dumped. When we read it last year (in hardcover!) we loved it. The story is this: Elizabeth Gilbert, best known for giving America the
GQ story that eventually became the classic film "Coyote Ugly", has just been dumped... by a sexy younger man who plays the lead in an off-Broadway adaptation of another of her books. With whom she had cheated on her husband? Who was good and kind and actually should have maybe been the one who got to write the bestselling breakup book? Suffice it to say, life isn't fair, which causes Liz enough internal turmoil that she gets an agent to sell a publisher on the idea that maybe she needs a little R&R of self-discovery through Italy, India and Indonesia, where she eats, meditates, and finds someone new to fuck, in that order. How could such a ingenious plan
not hold up as a universal guide to happiness? Read the Gchat book club discussion! Stephanie
hated it.
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Jezebel
