Committed

I mentioned Eat, Pray, Love a year or so ago, the memoir by Elizabeth Gilbert of traveling after a bad divorce and sort of finding herself along the way.  I loved it.  So when I heard Gilbert had written another memoir I knew I wanted to read it.

At the end of Eat, Pray, Love Gilbert falls in love with Felipe, a Brazilian-born man of Australian citizenship she meets in Indonesia.  Their relationship grows more serious over time, and they think of each other as their life partners but since both have survived bad divorces they vow not to get legally married.

Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage takes up a few years after the events of Eat, Pray, Love. 

Gilbert and Felipe are happy being an unmarried couple.  But Felipe, not a U.S. citizen, has been traveling to the U.S. legally on a series of temporary visas, staying for a while and then going to other countries (his work takes him all over the world). Eventually the U.S. government declines to grant him such a visa.  Gilbert and Felipe realize that, if they want to live in the United States, they will have to get married.

Gilbert throws herself into understanding the institution of marriage, learning about the history of marriage and what marriage means in different cultures, while traveling to Asia.  She explores how marriage means different things to different people. For example, she tells of a man she knew who, a farmer, realized he had to get married to have a wife to help him with the farm.  He married his bride more for practical than romantic reasons, choosing her not because he was madly in love but because she seemed a good candidate for the work, but over time they came to love each other and at the end of her life, he cared for her as she was ill with Alzheimer's.

I'm only a couple chapters into this so far but I'm finding it interesting.  Gilbert is a skilled writer.

Comments

[Linsey Maughan]

I read Eat, Pray, Love in 2009 and liked it, so I'm looking forward to Committed. I'm only a few pages into it, but am enjoying it so far.

One of my favorite writers, Ariel Levy of the New Yorker, wasn't especially pleased with Committed, the gist of her dissatisfaction being she didn't fully believe Gilbert wanted to marry by the end of the book. Levy said Gilbert's decision to wed wrapped up Committed with a happy ending, but that the "happy" part remained questionable.

I'm trying not to let Levy's opinions of Committed influence my experience reading it too much. I've just started the book and for the most part enjoy Gilbert as a writer and narrator.