Committed

Committed: a Skeptic makes Peace with Marriage
By Elizabeth Gilbert
Viking, 2010. 285 pgs. Biography

First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the baby…you know the rest. However, Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the immensely popular Eat, Pray, Love published in 2006, is now arguing against the staid virtues of that well-known rhyme because, quite frankly, the state of marriage is abhorrent to this divorcée. In Committed, her latest memoir, she’s fighting to keep her single state. That is, until her partner, Felipé, is forced to surrender his American passport and notified that he will only be allowed to re-enter the country if the couple legally join together in the official state of matrimony, holy or not.

Thus, Gilbert and her Brazilian lover (whom she met in Bali at the end of Eat, Pray, Love) grudgingly agree to wed, but only in order to appease the authorities. And so Gilbert begins her research, seeking to come to terms with her impending shackles. She sets out to explore marriage as an institution, melding the books she reads with the stories and experiences of the southeast Asians she meets while awaiting immigration’s permission to return to the U.S. Her adventures and insights are just as compelling as those of her first memoir, but conservatives will find her conclusions disturbing as Gilbert ends up seeking a broader interpretation of traditional matrimony -- the author ultimately decreeing that it is not she (or others) that will have to bend to the constraints of marriage, but “it is the institution of marriage that has to bend around us.”

DAP