Eat Pray Love: Watch, Dislike, Blog

Having been lucky enough to have travelled in Bali, India and Italy, and with a shaming love of self-help books (The Life Audit by Caroline Righton is a fave!), I was really interested to see Eat Pray Love.

I trotted off to the cinema on Saturday afternoon and sat amid of sea of hot flushes to watch the film, which stars Julia Roberts, Javier Bardem and Billy Crudup.

Now, having never read the book, I don’t know how accurate it is but the default setting of the film was ‘patronising’.

It begins in New York, where Julia Roberts’ character Liz appears to ditch her husband on a whim after a celestial being tells her to go back to bed when she gets up at night.

Like a therapy vampire, her new man tells her about an Indian ashram and, rather than inviting him, she ditches him and swans off there.

Not before a stay in Italy, where she scoffs pizza and mocks the locals for their expressive hand-gestures in a particularly cringe-worthy montage of her and her new BFFs wandering the streets of Roma.  

Next stop India, where she falls out with an American on an ashram and grumpily pushes a dishcloth around the floor.

The film even appears to confuse arranged and forced marriage in one conversation about a young ashram volunteer’s wedding day.

Next stop, it’s off to Bali for a bit of edgy chat and high flirting. Liz asks her friends to fund a woman’s home, instead of buying Liz birthday presents she doesn’t need. Unfortunately, my inner cynic was asking why she didn’t just fund the house herself, given that she was clearly given a hefty enough advance to write the book in the first place.

At this point I actually debated sneaking out but Javier Bardem’s sexy bearishness kept me in my seat.

Anywho, before I knew it Liz had gone mental at poor Javier and stomped off.

In all, the film passed an afternoon but it was painted in such broad strokes that the characters were really just caricatures and it had all the cultural realism of the Lion King.

And that even features a singing warthog. 

(My photo is my sister Helena and I in India) (I was going to put one each up of Italy, India and Indonesia but thought that might be a bit too navel-gazing).   

Desperately Romantic Reading

I finished reading Desperate Romantics last night after being glued to it for days.

It’s not so much that it's fantastically written – and the proofreaders should surely take the rap for some absolute howlers – but it's an entertaining romp through the lives of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti is an 1850s rock star painter: sexy, stomping around and swooning after every ‘stunner’ who waggles her hips at him as she wanders past.

He is joined by John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, who together form the 'secret' society PRB – publicly unveiled in the 1850s as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood – alongside Thomas Woolner, Frederick George Stephens, James Collinson and ‘wait for me!’ tagalong little brother William Michael Rossetti.

As the book progresses and the second wave of Pre-Raphaelites including William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones arrive, sexually incontinent Rossetti gets bored with his first muse, shopgirl Lizzie Siddal, and beds by turns Morris’ wife Jane, Pre-Raphaelite favourite Annie and anyone else with a swanlike neck, bee-sting lips and gingery hair.

Morris seeks solace following his wife’s affair in Mrs Burne-Jones;  then Pre-Raphaelite patron Ruskin’s wife annuls their marriage and runs off with Millais, causing the scandal of the century, and they all descend into a cloud of magenta and cyan-spattered frenzy.

Oh, and they all do a bit of painting too. 

Ophelia, Proserpine, Venus Astarte – the painters cast their muses in provocative, historical settings and spark furious outrage among Victorians with their sexually charged paintings.

Meanwhile, they set the scene for a new type of Bohemian lifestyle completely at odds with society’s veneration of the family.

As well as rattling through the story, Desperate Romantics also goes some way to disprove some of the most oft-repeated legends of the Victorian era.

The myth about John Ruskin’s disgust at his bride Effie’s pubic hair (a story even Bill Bryson recounted in At Home) being the reason he failed to consummate the marriage is dismissed. No one really knows what happened when poor Effie shrugged off her nightie on her wedding night but Ruskin must have studied Life Drawing classes so whatever turned him off, it wasn’t Effie’s womanly state. 

The mistakes in it are undeniably distracting – chloral once becomes ‘choral’, Lizzie Siddall meets a ‘grizzly’ end (was one of Rossetti’s exotic animals on the loose?) and ‘had’ and ‘has’ are confused, to name just a couple of mistakes.

It does not detract too far from the overall story but it is irritating and made me wonder – probably without base – whether a finer toothcomb should have been used on the research as well as the final story.

The attraction for modern readers with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood lies in the circle of friendship. I’m absolutely certain that if I was around in those times I’d have been swotting around with Christina Rossetti polishing the lyrics of In The Bleak Midwinter instead (“‘Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow?’ Bingo!”) but you can’t help imagine that if you had been sitting in the cheap seats of some hell-hole theatre, a clever artist might have walked past and decided you too had the face of Helen of Troy.

I didn’t actually watch the BBC TV series last year but having finished the book, I’m going to get myself the box set and settle down to tune in.

Welcome to my Blog!

Well, hello and welcome to my humble blog!

I decided to start it as I'm going through some big changes in my life and thought it'd be brilliant to document them. Since January I've become an auntie, run a half marathon, learnt how to sub-edit, become a godmother, quit my job and started the apparently long process of getting a job in publishing.

I've done work experience at Quercus and Random House, become part of the Society of Young Publishers Mentoring Scheme, fired off my CV in all directions and networked all round.

I'm hoping I'll be able to pass on a bit of what I know about what it's like to be a cub reporter and eventually - I hope - explain how I got my first full-time role in publishing.

I also like otters and reading so there might be a bit of that, too.

So join me! Bookmark me! Go on... you know it makes sense!