Nobody had claimed the title of “David Foster Wallace for girls” yet, so Lauren Oyler went for it.
Harper’s sent her on Goop at Sea (September 2022): nine days from Barcelona to Rome aboard the Celebrity Beyond, a one-off collaboration between Gwyneth Paltrow’s wellness empire and the same shipping line that had carried David Foster Wallace in Shipping Out. She rereads his essay along the way and decides it’s not that good. Balls of steel.
On board: spirulina smoothies, a holistic psychiatrist, tarot blamed on Mercury retrograde, a storm that cancels the Tuscan truffle excursion, and Paltrow herself, finally, for a talk that costs everyone a day in Italy. The darkest moment: parents ask about their teenage son’s anxiety and self-harm, and the speaker suggests his tinnitus might come from the COVID vaccine. Eight Goop guests, that speaker included, miss the ship in Naples after a private boat trip to Capri.
Self-mocking satire in first person, half luxury-wellness reportage, half sentimental memoir. And she doesn’t pretend the media, herself included, stand outside Goop’s provoke-and-click machine. Harper’s, May 2023.
https://harpers.org/archive/2023/05/goop-cruise-gwyneth-paltrow-goop-at-sea/