Hello and welcome to Slate's Audio Boot Club. I'm June Thomas. Today, our club members are discussing Elizabeth Gilbert's best-selling memoir, Eat, Pray, Love. To introduce the conversation, here's Stephen Metcalf.

Hello, I am Stephen Metcalf, a intermittent contributor to the Slate website, and I'm here today

in the Slate offices in New York City with Katie Roifey, a novelist, a nonfiction book writer, and a professor in the

School of Journalism at New York University, and Julia Turner, who is the culture editor of Slate.com.

We're here today to talk about a book that may be on the bestseller list until the end of time, barring a cataclysmic

event, eat, pray, love, one woman's search for everything across Italy, India, and Indonesia

by Elizabeth Gilbert.

Katie, you made me read this book.

And I think my choice was reading this book or getting down on all fours with a ball gag in my mouth and like a full gimp outfit on and being, you know, videoed for YouTube.

And now I'm second guessing my choice.

This is not a book that I admired, and I'm curious why you do.

Is there any place in particular you'd like to start in mounting a defense for a book

that I regard as nearly indefensible?

Well, I'll start up by saying I agreed with you when I first was asked by Slate to write about this book.

And I thought when I looked at it in the bookstore, it's so girly, it's so embarrassing.

It's exactly the kind of book I'm not going to want to open on the subway.

It's like a spiritual quest.

It sounded in all the conventions to be the stupidest book of all time.

However... It turned out to be only in the

lower decile of stupidest books of all time. Now, I think for various complicated reasons we can

discuss here, that Elizabeth Gilbert wrote actually a quite original book and that she, with her

very particular writing voice, her sense

...