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Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert

reviewed by Sandra Hogan
 

If you read Eat, Pray, Love, you probably can’t wait to find out what happens next to intrepid memoirist, Elizabeth Gilbert. In her first book, she recovered from a bitter divorce by running away for a year to three countries starting with the letter I. After eating her way through Italy, and praying through India, she fell in love in Indonesia.  It was a gorgeous, witty romp of a book and Gilbert’s warm, candid, energetic style left millions of readers longing for more.

Committed is the more and it ends, traditionally enough, with a wedding. Gilbert marries Felipe, the charming Brazilian and lives, we hope, happily ever after. But Gilbert is not really a happy-ever-after kind of girl and this is a very different kind of book from Eat, Pray, Love. Where the first memoir was full of discovery and delight, this one is full of angst.

Gilbert and her lover did not want to get married. This is an understatement—they were terrified of marriage. They knew, from experience, that it was easy to get married and hard to get unmarried. They knew divorce was expensive, bitter and probably not something you ever completely recover from.  They loved each other; they wanted to live together and be faithful to each other but they did not want church or state to get involved in that private transaction.

That was working fine until fate, in the form of the Office of Homeland Security, got involved.  In short, they had Green Card problems. Felipe was not a resident of the United States and he was told he could not enter the country ever again – unless they married.
The lovers fled to south-east Asia to wait while their immigration lawyer fought for them to have the right to marry. Gilbert spent the months of agonising uncertainty, while the law took its course, researching the topic of marriage. Her goal with this book was to help reconcile herself to the prospect of marrying the man she adored.

She studied the history, the philosophy and the psychology of marriage from books selected over the internet in Cambodia, Laos or Thailand. She also interviewed her friends and family about marriage as well as people she met in small Asian villages. Gilbert is a curious, determined researcher and she comes up with some fascinating information about the institution of wedlock. I was interested, for example, in the role of the church in marriage: initially the Christian church was firmly opposed to marriage and, it was only after centuries of resistance, that it reluctantly gave in and endorsed it. Later it discovered it was much more powerful to promote it actively and, in the case of some churches, to get deeply involved in the conduct and management of married life.

But Gilbert’s scope was not just a light-hearted survey of marriage practices – it was a deadly earnest attempt to understand its purpose and find a way to live with it as well as her man. She asked all the tough questions we should ask ourselves about marriage like: Who is it good for?  Can we remain autonomous individuals and still be married? What is the relation between marriage and love? And between marriage and property? What can we reasonably expect from marriage? 

Committed is at its best in the chapters where Gilbert is most personal, facing her own fears and writing about the pre-nuptial negotiations between her and Felipe about marriage, which occur under great pressure. She seems honest and tough-minded enough to be a good witness.

It’s a book I would give to people planning to marry and to those married people struggling with the state. It’s often insightful and wise. It offers perspective. It’s witty and readable. But, as with marriage, expectation is everything. Don’t expect a repeat of the glorious, joyful pleasures of Eat, Pray, Love. It’s just not that kind of a book.

About the Author

Sandra HoganSandra Hogan has worked as a shop assistant, supermarket shelf stacker, public servant and journalist and she now supports her writing habit by teaching  business people to write reports and letters. She is fascinated, among other things, by the science/religion wars. She is working on a book of linked short stories about lost things.

You can read her essay 'Unfinished business: why science still hasn’t vanquished religion' in a previous issue of Perilous Adventures by clicking here.

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