Customer Reviews

Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

5 star:		(90)
4 star:		(56)
3 star:		(40)
2 star:		(34)
1 star:		(48)

 

 

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?

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.

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.

"Committed" is a natural sequel to EPL. Elizabeth Gilbert's EPL is her path to recovery from divorce.

Most folks who have been divorced are highly reluctant to trot down the aisle again. . .will we be more successful this time?

Gilbert and "Felipe" were broke and broken at the end of their first marriages. They were gun-shy until the INS got out the shotgun.

The book is equal part examination of how the US government can create havoc in people's most intimate relationships as it is an examination of what it takes to have an enduring marriage and to experience unconditional love and true intimacy.

If you are looking for a starry-eyed romantic look at love, this isn't the book for you.

But, if you are serious about creating an enduring, mature, loving, intimate relationship, this book will give you much to ponder and discuss with the love of your life. It would be an excellent gift for any engaged couple.

Like so many others, I was curious to know what happened to Elizabeth and her Brazilian lover Felipe after Eat, Pray, Love ended. As the book opens they are still happily together, but with no intention of marrying. It becomes clear however that they will not be able to live together in the US unless they are married. (Or as Elizabeth puts it, they are "sentenced to marry by the Homeland Security Department").

This book is about how they spend most of the next year traveling in Asia waiting for Felipe's visa to process and for much of this time that Elizabeth researches the concept of marriage. So the book is part love story, part travelogue and part history. Or again as Elizabeth puts it, a memoir (with extra socio-historical bonus sections!) about her efforts to make peace with the institution of marriage.

The results are patchy. The historical/sociological parts are well written and interesting enough, but after a while it feels too much like a lecture. (Especially when Elizabeth puts her case for same sex marriages. I have no issue with her views, but neither am I very interested in them). It's when she's describing her own experiences that Gilbert's writing really shines. There are wonderful accounts of encounters with the local people in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam and I was also totally absorbed in her relationship with Felipe which she describes in a very honest and moving way. While she still has the same chatty and open writing style (which is very easy to read), she comes across as more mature and less self-absorbed this time around.

I'm not sure this book will stay with me in the way that Eat, Pray, Love did, but it was a satisfying read that did also make me think more about my own views on marriage.

I truly loved Eat Pray Love. Re-read it multiple times, found it beautifully written and inspiring. So as a HUGE fan of Miss Gilbert previously, it is quite a revelation for me to read this one.

But now, after "Committed", I start to wonder: are those people who gave EPL bad reviews right? Is it all self-centered, egotistical, narcissistic whining pretending to be something deep?

I am now inclined to start to think so. Despite me being impressed with the flawless language, excellent sense of humour of EPL, I can now see people have a point - it is an experiment in obsessive navel-gazing. Paid, mind you.

"Committed" is a long ramble about things trivial everyone knows about. It has no beginning and no logical end. It claims to be a woman's search for "Do I really need this thing, marriage?" and ends up with just that - marriage, and it leaves utterly unconvinced as to on what grounds that decision had been made. What I found particularly repellent is the main thread of the whole book is "What's in it FOR ME?". This pretty much summarises the whole book for you, ladies and gentlemen. Why do I need to do this? Will I gain anything? Will HE gain more than I will? And why should this be the case?

The idea that to love is not only to receive, but also and primarily, to give, somehow escapes Miss Gilbert.

Selfishness and ego centrical main motive in this book are unattractive beyond any words. I cannot imagine who in their right mind would ever want to live next to the author - all she is concerned about is herself, her interests, her pleasure, her gain. Moreover, she is obsessed with this. I am not saying every woman should suddenly turn to Mother Teresa and forget about her own interests, and I have great respect for some feminist ideas. Huge. But reading this book I couldn't shake off the feeling how egregious it is, to be concerned only about oneself.

She doesn't do anything for anyone around her. Oh, no, forgot - she does help her nieces. And in my mind, this is all an attempt to explain and justify her revulsion with the idea of having children - see, what a good person I am? See? I can do things for children. As long as I am not disturbed and inconvenienced. This is NOT love. This is as far from love as Bali from New Jersey. This is wanting to have a title of "Good Person" without having to do anything that would be uncomfortable, strenuous, or, God forbid, self-sacrificing.

She secretly (or is it openly?) despises her mother for giving her and her sister a stable, loving environment in their childhood. She throws tantrums with her husband-to-be. She has "expectations" that the person will be as she wants them to be - not the way they are.

Elizabeth now strikes me as someone truly selfish, vacuous, a bottomless pit which she is trying to fill with other people. And when they fail to fill that pit, she cuts and runs. It now makes me wonder, why she so categorically refused to comment on the reasons of her marriage break-up. I think I can have a pretty good guess, considering the immediate affair.

Utterly and bitterly disappointing. I want my money back. Half a star.

Eat, Pray, Love was like a torte. I savored every rich page and in fact delayed reading the final few chapters, as I never wanted the adventure, the jokes, the insights to end. As I'm sure Elizabeth Gilbert was keenly and painfully aware, that sort of appeal is nigh-impossible to top--or follow.

She could have simply kept going, stitching together outtakes from EPL into a second act that readers would have hungrily devoured. But to her credit, she was attempting to grow stylistically as a writer, satiate her intellectual curiosity, and share the results of her research. However, as with any monograph, as fascinating as the information uncovered may be, there's little plot. Here we enter Wait, Think, Wait territory. Gilbert has embodied the Hanged Man of the tarot deck, on a trip through the hell via a holding pattern in the airspace of Homeland Security. However, as maddening and frightening this place is, it doesn't offer enough of the sort of dramatic trajectory that made EPL famous. To make matters worse, Gilbert opts to lose her narrative tension almost immediately when she tells us that ultimately she will marry. A little "will she or won't she?" could have bought her some momentum.

Gilbert's forte are her interviews with people of other cultures, often those bearing scant resemblance to modern-day America's, such as the Hmong of Vietnam. I greatly admire her ability to establish instant rapport with her interview subjects. It is here where she sparkles most brilliantly, and here where I wish she'd lingered longer, as in EPL.

But curiously, Gilbert foregoes the luster of her real-world anecdotes to lead with extended passages about the history of marriage. And despite some fascinating facts, they seem to go on for many pages at a time, with little of her trademark humor. The "Marriage and History" chapter is 32 pages long, tossed in right as she starts to get some traction and grinding things to the halt like a droning Sunday sermon. It's sad because this could have been a reasonably quick fix. Her research simply needed to be assimilated more, spoken through her own lovely voice, and lavishly punctuated with examples from her globetrotting.

As Gilbert's editor, I would have sent her back to the parts that really sing: Her obvious affection for people and fascination with other cultures. Her capacity to sort through the noise and cull her own truths, after assimilating the perspectives of others. And her ability to turn our cherished paradigms on their ears by presenting radically different points of view. I will say that she does do some of the latter when she interviews the Hmong women, who seem to possess few romanticized notions about marriage--or the specialness of personal identity overall. To these people, "one man is the same as the next." They seemingly can't even grasp how a woman would fall in love with a man's specific qualities or personal za za zsu. They simply don't differentiate themselves from others--a fascinating concept, especially for Westerners hung up on their own personal punch lists of traits they bring to the party and those they can't live without. And, as Gilbert discovers, these marriages tend to endure far longer than ones driven by love and personal preference. As odd as it may seem, arranged marriages statistically stand a better chance of lasting. And thus, she worries--and worries and worries--that her own marriage to Felipe may not.

I really started to perk up about 2/3 of the way through, when Gilbert takes a sudden left turn, becoming much more personal, as she sifts the marriages and child-rearing experiences of her matrilineage. The excellent questions she raises about what constitutes happiness and satisfaction within the confines of marriage and rearing children provoke much thought, as they ask what we sacrifice or subsume in order to sustain a long-term marriage or family.

Despite its strengths, Committed has still left me a bit cold, and I can't tell if that's because I so adored its predecessor or due to its blatantly patched-together quality. I found myself wondering why her editor had apparently fallen asleep on the job.

I tried, I really did. I loved EPL. This was just a lightweight, sometimes interesting, but not well written survey of the concept of marriage; for some people. Halfway through I got seriously bored with her angst about remarrying. Enough of the whining already! As she illustrates with numerous examples (and a terrorist attack), there isn't enough talk in the world to make a bad match work. Her first marriage wasn't exactly a nightmare. And as she says, repeatedly, she wasn't ready for prime time. For cripessake, let it go!
I think the true love match aspect is that she found someone willing to ride around on third world buses, seemingly engaged with her inability to come to terms with a divorce that happened 12 years earlier. Most people would have jumped off the bus midway, and run screaming into the jungle.
"A Skeptic Makes Peace" should read, "After Over-talking It, More Interesting Travel, And Making Some Dough...Elizabeth Tries Again"

Elizabeth Gilbert memoirs begin in crisis.

In Eat, Pray, Love, she's on her bathroom floor at three in the morning, desperate to end her marriage.

In the just-published sequel, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage, Felipe --- the Brazilian she loves too much to marry --- is detained by Homeland Security as he tries to enter the United States and, six hours of interrogation later, is jailed and deported. (In fact, not really "deported", because he had a valid visa, a business in America and no criminal past; Homeland Security just decided he was coming to America too often.)

How can Felipe re-enter the United States? Well, if he and Liz were married... Now, if you or I were writing Committed --- heck, if almost anyone were writing it --- it would be a closely reported narrative exposing the policies of our government in a time when terrorists seem to enter our country freely and grandmothers are strip-searched. It might include a meditation on love separated and love expatriated. And, I suppose, it would explain how two people who were marriage-phobic came to love the knot.

Committed, I am astonished to say, is not that book. Not even close. There are a few memorable vignettes, but it's mostly a skim-the-surface tour of marriage through the ages. It lacks wisdom. It's dull. There's nothing to connect the reader to Gilbert. But Viking is unleashing a Palinesque million-copy first printing, and American women are about to be buried under the hype.

Don't say you weren't warned.

Like many I had been looking forward to Gilbert's next book and no I wasn't expecting another EPL but I did expect her insight, depth and beauty to shine through and for me it didn't. I felt like I was reading a neurotic person's rambling journal. It was trite, banal and lacked passion. With worldwide economic collapse and issues that are far more close to my heart, her privileged dilemmas hardly felt compelling. In EPL there were universal themes many of us could relate to and reflect on but this seemed like issues to be discussed with her therapist. I had to fight boredom to get through it. And finally I'm disappointed in yet another woman whose ultimate happy ending is defined by a man in her life. EPL started with how shattered she was when man number one was exiting and the book had a happy ending with man number two entering. The follow up book is obsessed with the idea of commitment to man number two, again man-centered. To me it was a waste of money even if you're interested in reading about marriage. In my opinion it was poorly written. Sorry but to whom much is given much is expected, we know you can do better Elizabeth.