Geographical Solution

Eat, Pay, Love--as if stick-thin Julia Roberts has ever eaten a decent meal in her entire life.

Aside from the irony, the movie follows a trend of dramatizing the angst of single almost-middle-aged women. Think Under the Tuscan Sun, think that Meryl Streep loser in which she galloped around like a circus horse at the head of a whole herd of equally clomping Italian women. In romance literature, think of Susan Elizabeth Phillip's Breathing Room.

Not to say that almost-middle-aged women don't have angst, but most of them also have a brood of children in tow and lack the means to pay for a trip out of town, much less to Italy, where all wonderful things seem to happen.