Karen Heller: Why 'Eat, Pray, Love' is such a phenomenon

Four Februarys ago, I met Elizabeth Gilbert in her rental cottage bordering the Schuylkill Valley Nature Center. She served a lovely lunch of curried eggs and fish, herbal tea, and Dum Dum lollipops, and spoke of her global peregrinations and of the little book she wrote about her journey from misery to enlightenment.

"I had no idea, when I left on this yearlong journey, that I would find everything I wanted," she said at the time.

That book was Eat, Pray, Love. Seven million copies later, EPL is a movement among fans (dubbed "Lizbians" by some), an industry (characters Luca Spaghetti and the late Richard from Texas spawned websites), and, come Friday, a movie directed by Ryan Murphy (Glee) starring Julia Roberts, with Javier Bardem as the Love.

Few people, if any, have made a greater success from former misery.

Gilbert grew up on a Christmas tree farm in Connecticut. To meet her is to be utterly and irrevocably charmed. She is more beguiling and far funnier than the character Roberts portrays.

"I can make friends with anybody," Gilbert said at the time. Which is one reason EPL continues to crest the bestseller list after more than three years: This is a book that makes friends with the reader. It's an object of affection.

And it's impossible to begrudge the 40-year-old Gilbert her extraordinary success, even though - and this can't be stressed enough - she wrote EPL in six weeks while being paid, from her book advance, to eat pizza in Italy, pray in India, and frolic in Bali.

In return, now she buys houses for friends, supports causes abroad, sponsors artists and businesses near her home in Hunterdon County, N.J., where she and her husband, Jose, run an import store. The business model? "We are obsessed with beauty."

At the screening Monday, fans watched in a state of near-rapture. It's easy to make fun of the phenomenon, and many have, but I witnessed an audience, largely female, starved for any intelligent and rewarding diversion, on the large screen or small, that centers on a woman's emotional life. EPL the film is this season's rarity: a potential blockbuster viewers consume in silence, freed from a bombardment of car chases, guns, and screams. It's a big quiet movie.

EPL avoids the classic cinematic path to enlightenment: the shopping makeover, which Roberts perfected in her breakthrough rom-com, Pretty Woman, about the hooker with the credit card of pure platinum. EPL's devoid of a single instance in which the heroine disparages her appearance. Instead, she chooses weight gain (granted, it's hardly visible on Roberts) in a love affair with pasta and pizza (a friend dubbed Gilbert's trip the "No Carb Left Behind" tour). The movie also takes a pronounced political stand of rejecting salad, the default sustenance of American women between the ages of 20 and death.

And that's another appealing aspect of the EPL phenomenon: It crosses over from surface pleasures, though there's plenty of food and travel porn (and the beauty of Bardem), into spiritual rewards, those endorsed by the big O - Oprah, Gilbert's huge champion. The movie's the opposite of the tone-deaf, shrill consumption clunker Sex and the City 2.

The story is as simple, and old, as finding happiness with yourself before finding it with someone else. If that journey takes you to spectacular places, so be it. We'll watch.

Why all movies, as well as books, dealing with women's feelings are automatically labeled "chick" whatever continues to astonish, especially given how much sports coverage is now devoted to male athletes' emotional well-being. Isn't the Tiger tale pure soap?

Look, seven million readers can't be wrong. Lucky Liz, as her friends call her, mined a gusher of emotional need and fulfillment. Eat, Pray, Love the book, and now the movie, delivers what women really want: intelligence, humor, a journey, and - why not? - a happy ending.