ChristinedePizan, spot on! I read the book because my partner had been reading it for a reading group and left it laying about, and ended up seeing the film because I got stranded on foot in a thunderstorm at the cinema, and it was the only thing showing that didn't involve a serious body count. (For anyone who's wondering, the film is, in fact, worse, than the heap of navel-gazing dross that was the 'memoir', partly because it leaves out the only genuinely interesting bit in the book - the episode in Indonesia where a poor local woman, perfectly understandably, decides to try to get a piece of the financial action from the self-indulgent First Worlder, because she's not content to be Picturesque Background Character.)
I have no particular problem with navel-gazing when intelligently done, or when it's light-hearted but makes no claims to profundity. My issue with the book was the unthinking 'Hey, the rest of the world is a Disney theme park featuring funny foreigners and their funny little ways and languages, to which Americans can go to Find Themselves!' So Italy was Food and Comical Italians, India was Hinduism-Lite, and Indonesia was Funny Little Soothsayer and Dreamy Foreigner Sex.
For all she learned or told the reader about any of those places, she and her navel might as well have stayed in NY - only then she wouldn't have got the highly-motivating million-dollar advance she stays so quiet about in the book. There seems to me to be a big difference between wandering to figure stuff out, and wandering to earn back your advance - how many of the episodes she writes about were sought out/invented specifically with a view to 'fitting' in her book?