At the end of her memoir Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert fell in love with Felipe, a Brazilian living in Indonesia. The couple swore eternal love, but also swore (as skittish divorce survivors) never to marry. However, providence intervened in the form of a U.S. government ultimatum: get married, or Felipe could never enter America again. Told with Gilbert's trademark humor and intelligence, this fascinating meditation on compatibility and fidelity chronicles Gilbert's complex and sometimes frightening journey into second marriage, and will enthrall the millions of readers who made Eat, Pray, Love a number one bestseller.
Committed: A Love Story
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Book Description
At the end of her memoir Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert fell in love with Felipe, a Brazilian living in Indonesia. The couple swore eternal love, but also swore (as skittish divorce survivors) never to marry. However, providence intervened in the form of a U.S. government ultimatum: get married, or Felipe could never enter America again. Told with Gilbert's trademark humor and intelligence, this fascinating meditation on compatibility and fidelity chronicles Gilbert's complex and sometimes frightening journey into second marriage, and will enthrall the millions of readers who made Eat, Pray, Love a number one bestseller.
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Gilbert's sequel to the megabestselling Eat, Pray, Love is a serious, sincere, yet ultimately tedious slog of a listen. Debating whether or not to marry her boyfriend, the author embarks on a one-year study of marriage's evolution, cultural variations, pitfalls, and pleasures. It's earnest and heartfelt, but there's no story. Gilbert's encapsulations of her research cannot sustain the reader's interest, and her forays into amateur anthropology in Southeast Asia are crude and uncharitable: she vacillates between tropes of the happy savage and crowing that the Hmong women she interviews will never know her level of education, health, and agency. But these considerable flaws belong to the material alone; Gilbert's reading is unimpeachable. Her voice is low, warm, slightly hoarse; her attitude is confiding and self-deprecating, and her charm does much in making the book's less palatable sections go down easily. A Viking hardcover (Reviews, Nov. 23). (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Booklist
Sure it garnered starred reviews, but who knew that Gilbert’s memoir about her quest for psychic healing, Eat, Pray, Love (2006), would become what she describes as a “megajumbo international best-seller”? Or that she would be in demand as a relationship guru? Or that her relationship with Felipe, the Brazilian businessman she fell in love with in Bali, would get so complicated? An Australian citizen, Felipe was living with Gilbert in the U.S. on a visa-to-visa basis until Homeland Security denied him reentry. As post-traumatic-divorce syndrome sufferers, they swore never to remarry, but marry they must if they want to be together in the States. This effort involves a humongous amount of red tape and time, so they set off on a rambling trip across Southeast Asia, and Gilbert tries to banish her fears by embarking on a crash course in the history, practice, and meaning of marriage. Her far-roaming inquiry, much of it focused on the paradoxes in women’s lives, is presumptuous and trite one moment (her observations about women in Asia are cringe-inducing) and incisive and funny the next (her portraits of her grandmother and mother are sensitive and scintillating). Ultimately, she tells an irresistibly romantic tale spiked with unusual and resonant insights into love and marriage. --Donna Seaman
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
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More About the Author
Elizabeth Gilbert is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love, as well as the short story collection, Pilgrims--a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and winner of the 1999 John C. Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares. A Pushcart Prize winner and National Magazine Award-nominated journalist, she works as writer-at-large for GQ. Her journalism has been published in Harper's Bazaar, Spin, and The New York Times Magazine, and her stories have appeared in Esquire, Story, and the Paris Review.
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
423 of 443 people found the following review helpful
By Grace
Format:Hardcover
I adore Eat, Pray, Love for a variety of reasons. This book however, is not Eat, Pray, Love. Thankfully, it doesn't pretend to be. My advice: don't read "Committed" if you are hoping to lose yourself in a compelling story, because you might get bored. Read it if you are interested in learning about marriage - what it is and what it is not, why it sometimes works and why it sometimes doesn't - and are prepared to examine your own assumptions about this beautiful yet fraught concept.
Some readers may not consider this work an adequate sequel to EPL for stylistic reasons - the storyline is simpler, the tone more somber, and the laughs rarer. But I'm not one of them. For me (and I can only speak for myself), EPL was a pleasure to read because it helped me learn more about myself and my relationship to relationships, which is precisely what "Committed" succeeds at doing. What could be more useful than a book that celebrates not only marriage, but the self inquiry and interpersonal work required to sustain one? For that matter, what could be more romantic?
Some readers may not consider this work an adequate sequel to EPL for stylistic reasons - the storyline is simpler, the tone more somber, and the laughs rarer. But I'm not one of them. For me (and I can only speak for myself), EPL was a pleasure to read because it helped me learn more about myself and my relationship to relationships, which is precisely what "Committed" succeeds at doing. What could be more useful than a book that celebrates not only marriage, but the self inquiry and interpersonal work required to sustain one? For that matter, what could be more romantic?
306 of 328 people found the following review helpful
By KimberlyA.
Format:Hardcover
Embarking on writing a major work after the spectacular Eat, Pray, Love, must have been no easy feat. However, undaunted and honest as ever, Elizabeth Gilbert provides an eye-opening and thorough account of the colossal entity we call marriage. We have all grown up accepting marriage as a given. It seems to be taken as common place that people simply grow up and get married- and then (of course) live happily ever after. Or is it that easy?
Not so fast, Gilbert warns us. Do we completely know what we are getting into? What happens to us as independent beings when we marry? What makes a marriage more likely to succeed, and what makes it more likely to fail? What are the economic, social, and legal ties that bind us and do we even understand the significance of them? How are we able to somehow throw love in the mix as well? Extremely timely and pertinent questions with serious implications. Some of the most interesting and thought provoking aspects of the book- a glimpse into the lives of the Hmong women in Asia (who view marriage not as a solution to all of life's problems and seem to have no qualms whatsoever about this), how marriage was viewed by different religions throughout the centuries- not always so 'sacred', and the way marriage has been used to secure money, power, and property throughout history. Quite simply, Gilbert explains this institution has been pulled, prodded, and changed for centuries- yet still it remains. There is something, then that draws us still to marry. Gilbert (thrown rather harshy into marriage by the US government) walks away with a brokered peace with marriage and a deeper understanding of what it means to be married- as she embarks on her own marriage. The reader has a deeper understanding as well.
As a final note, what is more important if not the subject of who we spend our lives with? Who we share our faith, time, children, money, and precious moments with? As a new mother who married five years ago at the age of 24 (I know this puts me into the danger zone :), this book has given me fuller understanding of what it means to be married and coming to respect my own marriage as an imperfect, changing, and totally lovable creature- much like my own baby son. (Quite simply, the white gown and endless talks about the church and reception hall didn't really matter- the chats we had about faith, child-rearing, navigating our political differences, and in-laws definitely mattered.) It has once been said that 'The unexamined life is not worth living.' Gilbert's book suggests that perhaps an unexamined marriage is not worth having- and I'd agree.
Not so fast, Gilbert warns us. Do we completely know what we are getting into? What happens to us as independent beings when we marry? What makes a marriage more likely to succeed, and what makes it more likely to fail? What are the economic, social, and legal ties that bind us and do we even understand the significance of them? How are we able to somehow throw love in the mix as well? Extremely timely and pertinent questions with serious implications. Some of the most interesting and thought provoking aspects of the book- a glimpse into the lives of the Hmong women in Asia (who view marriage not as a solution to all of life's problems and seem to have no qualms whatsoever about this), how marriage was viewed by different religions throughout the centuries- not always so 'sacred', and the way marriage has been used to secure money, power, and property throughout history. Quite simply, Gilbert explains this institution has been pulled, prodded, and changed for centuries- yet still it remains. There is something, then that draws us still to marry. Gilbert (thrown rather harshy into marriage by the US government) walks away with a brokered peace with marriage and a deeper understanding of what it means to be married- as she embarks on her own marriage. The reader has a deeper understanding as well.
As a final note, what is more important if not the subject of who we spend our lives with? Who we share our faith, time, children, money, and precious moments with? As a new mother who married five years ago at the age of 24 (I know this puts me into the danger zone :), this book has given me fuller understanding of what it means to be married and coming to respect my own marriage as an imperfect, changing, and totally lovable creature- much like my own baby son. (Quite simply, the white gown and endless talks about the church and reception hall didn't really matter- the chats we had about faith, child-rearing, navigating our political differences, and in-laws definitely mattered.) It has once been said that 'The unexamined life is not worth living.' Gilbert's book suggests that perhaps an unexamined marriage is not worth having- and I'd agree.
110 of 125 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
I'm a big fan of Elizabeth Gilbert and loved Eat, Pray, Love as well as her talk on creativity at the TED conference circulating on YouTube. Her blend of factual information, anecdote and creative interpretation is illuminating and entertaining. And Committed has its share of humor and aha! moments.
In her preface to Committed, Gilbert says she originally wrote a 500-page version of this book, then discarded it. She implies it was too pedantic, so the second time she wrote it imagining only an audience of close women friends. I believe this gives the book a talky, chatty quality that does not translate well to the written page. There are too many "anyways", redundancies and extraneous phrases. If she were speaking this text to us, we could experience her gestures and facial expressions, inflection and dramatic pauses; the audiovisuals of conversation would keep us interested. But on the two-dimensional page, I found myself growing impatient and wishing she had thinned the verbiage by 30 per cent.
I also felt uncomfortable with the amount of very personal information she revealed about her husband and her parents. A confessional approach to one's own life by a memoirist is one thing; to expose and discuss other peoples' intimate feelings and issues seems exploitative.
Another problem was the lack of sourcing for her valuable factual data, particularly, her fascinating material on the evolution of marriage. This information could be very useful to call out the "ancient tradition" excuse for social repression. But without sources, it's much less useful. She did list about 20 authors in one sentence in her acknowledgements but this doesn't help much. Gilbert has one explanatory footnote in her book and says with seeming pride that it is "the only footnote in the book". Again, I think she went overboard on veering away from pedantry.
The idea for this book and much of its information is interesting and valuable. I wish Gilbert had imagined a wider, less personally familiar audience so that her writing might have been more pithy and vivid. I believe this book packed a punch but it became buried and invisible in the rambling, chatty delivery.
In her preface to Committed, Gilbert says she originally wrote a 500-page version of this book, then discarded it. She implies it was too pedantic, so the second time she wrote it imagining only an audience of close women friends. I believe this gives the book a talky, chatty quality that does not translate well to the written page. There are too many "anyways", redundancies and extraneous phrases. If she were speaking this text to us, we could experience her gestures and facial expressions, inflection and dramatic pauses; the audiovisuals of conversation would keep us interested. But on the two-dimensional page, I found myself growing impatient and wishing she had thinned the verbiage by 30 per cent.
I also felt uncomfortable with the amount of very personal information she revealed about her husband and her parents. A confessional approach to one's own life by a memoirist is one thing; to expose and discuss other peoples' intimate feelings and issues seems exploitative.
Another problem was the lack of sourcing for her valuable factual data, particularly, her fascinating material on the evolution of marriage. This information could be very useful to call out the "ancient tradition" excuse for social repression. But without sources, it's much less useful. She did list about 20 authors in one sentence in her acknowledgements but this doesn't help much. Gilbert has one explanatory footnote in her book and says with seeming pride that it is "the only footnote in the book". Again, I think she went overboard on veering away from pedantry.
The idea for this book and much of its information is interesting and valuable. I wish Gilbert had imagined a wider, less personally familiar audience so that her writing might have been more pithy and vivid. I believe this book packed a punch but it became buried and invisible in the rambling, chatty delivery.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Better than Eat Pray Love
Everyone should read this book. It's delightful...genuinely Liz Gilbert. I can't wait to read her next book when it comes out.
Published 3 days ago by Summer Rose
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent writing and great insights
love her writing and I found this book to offer perspectives that helped me understand how infidelity can worm its way in unsuspectingly.
Published 10 days ago by Kristin Anderson
5.0 out of 5 stars
Comitted : A Love Story by Elizabeth Gilbert
I received this Book , few minutes ago. I am so impress with this seller The Book Treasury ! That , I had to say right away. Read more
Published 12 days ago by Audriana
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not very interesting book
I can not recommend this book... it is only about problems with marriage. The author must be really disgusted of marriage.
Published 14 days ago by Barbora Hruskova
5.0 out of 5 stars
Being ordinary
Gilbert is just like everyone else, filled with imperfections and complaints. But when she writes about it she takes us all into a space of feeling better. Read more
Published 27 days ago by sophie h.quest
2.0 out of 5 stars
Too smug and cutesy
I haven't read her earlier books, but was interested in the idea of this book on marriage. Her writing is a bit too cutesy for my taste, and at times even cringe-worthy. Read more
Published 1 month ago by debralynn
3.0 out of 5 stars
Lots of Data
I can tell the author thinks like I do - she researched the heck out of marriage in different cultures and statistical data from every aspect. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Kristeena Romero
5.0 out of 5 stars
Lovely and extremely educational story
Following on the heels of eat, pray, love, Gilbert traces the fascinating cultural and historical history of the marriage rite and institution along with her own journey to the... Read more
Published 1 month ago by samantha
5.0 out of 5 stars
Committed
This a great follow-up to the original Eat, Pray, Love. (Wish I had the guts to do what she did!) Elizabeth Gilbert writes in a way that feels like you're listening to your best... Read more
Published 1 month ago by PATTI
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent
Ms. Gilberts journey that continued from "Eat, Pray, Love" was very helpful and entertaining at the same time. Read more
Published 1 month ago by patrika
