From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. You can also hear the show at KCRW.com.

It makes sense that Jennifer Salt would be a screenwriter.

The first act of her career was as an actress where she worked with Robert Altman, Woody Allen, Brian DePalma, when he was a satirist, John Schlesinger, Midnight Cowboy.

And the second part of her career has been as a writer, where she partnered up with Ryan Murphy. They first worked together on the series NipTuck, where she was a writer producer, and they co-authored the screenplay of Eat, Pray, Love. Jennifer, thanks so much for being here.

My pleasure. First of all, tell us about what Eat, Pray, Love is about if you can.

Well, Eat, Pray, Love is about a woman who feels that she's in need of a transformational journey.

She's unhappy in her life.

She's, it just didn't turn out the way she wanted it to.

I think she did everything she was supposed to do and found herself like, as she says in the book,

a squirrel in a box, desperate for some other life

and not knowing who she was or what that life had to be.

And so she takes her life in hand against all better judgment

and makes this journey across the world.

Spends four months in Rome to learn sort of the celebration of herself,

the nurturing of herself, the pleasure that she's not known.

And then she goes to the ashram in India to, I guess, I mean, she calls it

pray, but it's really about rigorous meditation and self-transformation. And then she goes to Bali,

where everyone knows that Bali's sort of about marrying those two

principles, the worldly and the spiritual, and tries to put them together, and she

unexpectedly finds love.

It's kind of a wife as a three-act structure, isn't it?

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