These monosyllables govern one another by means of an order both consolatory and somewhat foreign to modern female experience: eating first, loving last, and praying – an activity unpoliticised by the female psyche and one she might vaguely associate with being cared for, separating the two like a referee a pair of boxers in the ring. Without quite knowing why, 21st-century woman finds this a powerful trinity to behold on the cover of a book. Not to mention the reader – for the words eat, pray and love might in themselves be an invocation of the lost or prohibited pleasures of femininity: hedonism, devotion, sensuality. The book's actual title, Eat, Pray, Love, is sincere, almost reverential: the function of the joke is to fumigate that sincerity regularly to allay any suspicion that the author is taking herself too seriously in her use of it. Richard's rule about travelling in India is a sound one: 'Don't touch anything but yourself.' (And yes, that was also a tentative title for this book.)" "A few times a week," runs one example, "Richard and I wander into town and share one small bottle of Thums Up – a radical experience after the purity of vegetarian ashram food – always being careful not to actually touch the bottle with our lips. T here's a running gag in Elizabeth Gilbert's best-selling memoir of breakdown and recovery, concerning alternative titles she claims to have considered for her book.
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