Hm, maybe? I was actually surprised that the romance was much less of the overall story than I was expecting—she doesn't find her paramour until quite close to the end, and all her relationships before that are strictly platonic.
But! I could imagine it feeling like this wonderful escapist fantasy if you were in a certain frame of mind—in the opening, Gilbert's stuck in a marriage where she's desperately unhappy, and she's realized she doesn't want kids, and instead of just putting up with What You're Supposed To Do, she... gets a divorce and then gets paid to flounce across the world for a year! accountable to no one but herself! (Probably this felt more exotic some 15 years ago? I know a lot of techies, and it's a bit of a cliché among them to quit their job sometime in their 20s/30s and do something self-indulgent for a few months to a year, haha.) I could certainly imagine someone who's intimidated by the thought of international travel finding this particularly comforting/wish-fulfilling—after all, Gilbert is just some ordinary person, and she manages to travel to all these beautiful places by just figuring stuff out as she goes along; maybe travel is something I could do too, etc.
I think also it helps that Gilbert's both very chatty and very down-to-earth, because it means she makes friends everywhere she goes, and those character profiles are pretty lovingly drawn—you feel for, e.g., the chatty Indonesian guitarist who'd lived in NYC for a few years, before getting deported from the US in an infuriatingly unjust bout of post-9/11 paranoia (he and Gilbert end up going on a short road trip through Bali together to nostalgically relive the "American road trip experience"), and also it's delightful to read Gilbert's chats with the tomboyish teenage girl at the ashram, who grew up nearby and has some Strong Opinions about her family's plans for her... I definitely finished the book thinking Gilbert would make for a somewhat exhausting friend (lots of drama, lol), but an excellent person to chat with at a cocktail party, and I could see why that'd be endearing enough to "make" the book for a lot of people.
(And yeah, definitely marketing, haha. I doubt her publisher paid that hefty advance without planning to market the heck out of the result!)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2021-12-09 08:31 pm (UTC)Hm, maybe? I was actually surprised that the romance was much less of the overall story than I was expecting—she doesn't find her paramour until quite close to the end, and all her relationships before that are strictly platonic.
But! I could imagine it feeling like this wonderful escapist fantasy if you were in a certain frame of mind—in the opening, Gilbert's stuck in a marriage where she's desperately unhappy, and she's realized she doesn't want kids, and instead of just putting up with What You're Supposed To Do, she... gets a divorce and then gets paid to flounce across the world for a year! accountable to no one but herself! (Probably this felt more exotic some 15 years ago? I know a lot of techies, and it's a bit of a cliché among them to quit their job sometime in their 20s/30s and do something self-indulgent for a few months to a year, haha.) I could certainly imagine someone who's intimidated by the thought of international travel finding this particularly comforting/wish-fulfilling—after all, Gilbert is just some ordinary person, and she manages to travel to all these beautiful places by just figuring stuff out as she goes along; maybe travel is something I could do too, etc.
I think also it helps that Gilbert's both very chatty and very down-to-earth, because it means she makes friends everywhere she goes, and those character profiles are pretty lovingly drawn—you feel for, e.g., the chatty Indonesian guitarist who'd lived in NYC for a few years, before getting deported from the US in an infuriatingly unjust bout of post-9/11 paranoia (he and Gilbert end up going on a short road trip through Bali together to nostalgically relive the "American road trip experience"), and also it's delightful to read Gilbert's chats with the tomboyish teenage girl at the ashram, who grew up nearby and has some Strong Opinions about her family's plans for her... I definitely finished the book thinking Gilbert would make for a somewhat exhausting friend (lots of drama, lol), but an excellent person to chat with at a cocktail party, and I could see why that'd be endearing enough to "make" the book for a lot of people.
(And yeah, definitely marketing, haha. I doubt her publisher paid that hefty advance without planning to market the heck out of the result!)