Eat, Pray, Love : Producing the Female Neoliberal Spiritual Subject

O RIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN 2006, ELIZABETH GILBERT’S MEMOIR EAT, Pray, Love, has garnered an enormous popularity that shows no sign of ceasing. With over seven million copies currently in print, the book has spent, as of December 3, 2010, 199 weeks on the New York Times paperback nonfiction bestseller list (New York Times), with conservative estimates projecting at least US$15 million in earnings for the book’s publisher, Penguin (Trachtenberg). Book sales received a bump in August 2010, with the release of a long-awaited film adaptation of Eat, Pray, Love starring Julia Roberts. Currently, box office sales for the film total more than US$180 million, with additional dollars expected from showings in international venues as well as DVD sales (Paul). This is not to mention the revenue generated by the over four hundred Eat, Pray, Love product tie-ins which the Home Shopping Network showcased after the movie’s premier via ‘‘three days of on-air branded content and an interactive Web site’’ (Boorstin). Products that bear the Eat, Pray, Love (EPL) brand (both officially and unofficially) range from perfume, tea, yoga gear, prayer beads, and jewelry to EPL -themed travel tours that include spa treatments, visits to temples, and copious amounts of yoga and meditation—all activities Gilbert herself partook in as she wrote her book. As CNBC correspondent Julia Boorstin notes, these products represent ‘‘breaking ground for how content and merchandise [can] work together’’ to generate increasing flows of revenue. From the outset, Eat, Pray, Love and the attendant EPL brand have been explicitly targeted at a female audience. Though such surface