14-1-2010
Committed, by Elizabeth Gilbert
January 7, 2010
Sex guru Suzi Godson reviews two books about marriage
The English Marriage: Tales of Love, Money and Adultery by
Maureen Waller
John Murray, £25; 420pp
Committed: A Sceptic Makes Peace with Marriage by
Elizabeth Gilbert
Bloomsbury, £12.99; 285pp
For the first time since records began, married couples are in a minority in Britain. Almost half of all children are born out of wedlock, and in a bid to steal the title of “Family Champion” from David Cameron, Gordon Brown is finally abandoning the Labour Party’s ambivalence towards marriage and conceding that children fare better if their parents are together.
Maureen Waller’s The English Marriage and Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert should be required reading for the lot of them. Waller’s book is a fascinating historical romp through the private lives of the great, the good and the downright horrible, while Gilbert’s is a more reflective analysis of modern marriage; both books succeed in making their readers consider what marriage really means.
Waller’s tales of “Love, Money and Adultery” begin in 1465 with the story of 17-year-old Margery Paston, ostracised by her family for choosing to marry for love rather than money, and end in 2008 with Heather Mills, ostracised by pretty much everybody for trying to extract £125 million from Sir Paul McCartney after only four years of marriage.
Waller, a social historian, uses meticulous research to piece together love letters, hate mail, private diaries, historic advice manuals and court judgments, tracing the evolution of the English marriage from the unjust contract that John Stuart Mill equated to slavery to the present exchange, which is “more about celebration than lifelong commitment”. As the book progresses the word marriage begins to feel like a misnomer: even though “divorce with permission to remarry” was not introduced until 1857, most of the unions that Waller documents end with either self-divorce, desertion, private and judicial separation, or worse.
Needless to say, marital breakdown rarely worked in favour of the wife. It wasn’t until the Married Woman’s Property Act of 1882 that women were allowed to retain property owned at the time of their marriage. The level of cruelty towards women in traditional British society beggars belief. Legally, a married woman had no personal identity and her husband could do what he liked with her body, her freedom, her money or her children. As late as 1782 a man still had the legal right to beat his wife as long as the stick was no thicker than his thumb — hence, the “rule of thumb”. Murdering a wife was merely a felony, while female infidelity merited a death sentence since it could affect a child’s legitimacy. A woman who killed her husband was guilty of high treason, a crime routinely punished with “death by burning” until 1790.
Despite so many of the individual relationships she documents featuring loveless arranged marriages, adultery, violence, theft, avarice, deceit, kidnap, rape and even murder, in her epilogue Waller cautions readers not to forget that “in a throwaway society we ignore the wisdom and experience of our forebears at our peril”. In modern marriage “the quiet contemplation of the meaning of the vows ... seems to be lost amid noisy stag nights and hen nights, focus on the dress and other external appearances, and the reception”.
One woman who would beg to differ is Elizabeth Gilbert. The American author approached her second marriage with such trepidation that she spent ten months researching the historical, social, political and philosophical implications beforehand. Gilbert had already learnt the hard way that “marriage is an estate that is very much easier to enter than it is to exit”.
After a painful divorce, Gilbert had vowed never to marry again. Instead, she wrote a bestselling first book, Eat, Pray, Love, and decided to live happily ever after with her Brazilian non-husband, Felipe. But when Felipe is thrown in jail and deported from the US, she is forced to reconsider. An immigration officer tells the couple that the only way Felipe will ever be allowed back into the country is if they marry, but it is not a decision either takes lightly.
It is Gilbert’s efforts to make peace with the “complicated, but stubbornly enduring institution of marriage” that inspired her new book. Gilbert joins her partner in exile and the couple spend the next ten months travelling through South-East Asia. She uses the time to interview locals and plough through a mountain of books and research. Though it does, at times, feel as if she has cherry-picked the most interesting ideas from authoritative works on marriage, she also makes academic texts accessible to a wide audience.
The liberation of women, financial independence, the erosion of religious belief and the sexual revolution of the 1960s have all placed strains on traditional marriage, but both Waller and Gilbert end up blaming rising divorce rates on the fact that, as Waller puts it, “the demand for emotional and sexual fulfilment from marriage has risen to unrealistic levels and there is less tolerance of boredom or a partner’s shortcomings”. Gilbert’s view is more romantic. She asks whether “divorce is the tax we collectively pay as a culture for daring to believe in love, or at least, for daring to link love to such a vital social contract as matrimony?”
The French author and psychologist Maryse Vaillant is more pragmatic. In her book Men, Love, Fidelity, she argues that monogamy is not natural and that “to imagine that love always goes hand in hand with absolute fidelity will expose us only to painful disappointment”. Certainly, more men than women engage in extramarital sex, and 75 per cent of all divorces are instigated by wives, but infidelity is not an inevitability, Gilbert argues. She once believed that “desire was as unmanageable as a tornado” and that “couples whose marriages lasted decades were just lucky not to have been hit”. It never occurred to her that “they might have actually constructed storm cellars together under their home where they could retreat when the winds picked up”.
Waller believes that “there is less incentive to work at marriage when it is all too easy to end it”, but Gilbert, who is “still painfully writing cheques to her ex-husband”, would also disagree with that. Divorce is no picnic for either party, but a study by the Institute of Social and Economic Research found that a man’s disposable income increases by 15 per cent after a divorce, whereas a woman’s falls by 28 per cent. It’s important because one in four children lives with a single parent, 91 per cent of single parents are female, and single parents are the poorest group of people in the UK.
Gilbert’s book ends with her well-planned marriage, but Waller concludes her history by focusing on the minority of “toxic wives” who strike gold in the divorce courts. They are a neat but anomalous antithesis to the put-upon women who litter the path to emancipation; but in reality, women and children are still the ones who pay the highest price for the breakdown of relationships. Same as it ever was.
January 17, 2010
Committed: A Sceptic Makes Peace with Marriage by Elizabeth Gilbert/Couples: The Truth by Kate Figes
Eleanor Mills
Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert
Bloomsbury £12.99 pp304
Couples by Kate Figes
Virago £14.99 pp416
How can emancipated women in the 21st century reconcile freedom and professional success with the urge to have children? And can all of this be achieved within that ancient institution, marriage? These are the main questions posed by two very different books tackling the same subject.
Elizabeth Gilbert’s first book, Eat, Pray, Love, sold 7m copies and put her on best-friend terms with many of the women who read it: Oprah Winfrey loved it, so did Julia Roberts. In chummy, jolly prose it chronicled her divorce, car-crash post-split love affair and travels abroad to heal her broken life. It was an everywoman journey, told with wit and verve, and resonated globally.
Like Eat, Pray, Love, her follow-up, Committed, feels irresistibly confessional. Although sold as a kind of potted history of marriage, it is really another memoir; this time about how, despite having promised herself never to get hitched again, Gilbert decides to marry her Brazilian lover Felipe (the “Love” of the first book) to get him a green card.
I wasn’t sure early on whether Committed was going to work; Gilbert begins by doing some amateur sociological research, hanging out in southeast Asia with the Hmong tribe, who reckon that one husband is much like another, there to fulfil certain functions (making babies, shifting heavy things) while the woman spends most of her time with the other women. The point Gilbert draws from this is that couples in the West now expect their other half to be everything: best friend, lover, psychologist — and perhaps that’s too much to ask of any one relationship.
The book improves markedly when she starts to focus on her real subject: herself. Felipe is stopped by US border security and put in a cell, and a kind official tells Gilbert the only way they can go on being together is if they get married. After this, Committed becomes an attempt to find a solid reason to marry again.
Surprisingly, it is Ferdinand Mount, the right-wing British writer, who supplies Gilbert with the goods. Mount argues that the union between two people is the most powerful bond in the world; totalitarian states hate it because they can’t control it. But marriage, argues Mount, is the ultimate anarchic act, one that creates a special state for two that nobody else can violate or spy upon.
The marriage Gilbert envisages, though, is far from a traditional one. It is what she terms “wifeless marriage: which is to say that nobody in our household will play (or play exclusively) the traditional role of the wife? Felipe and I will have to make up the rules and the boundaries of our story as we go along”.
What Gilbert calls “wifeless marriage”, Kate Figes in Couples terms “peer marriage”. Both phrases describe the kind of modern unions where partners are equal, both earn money, both share the domestic chores and childcare, and old notions of gender-determining roles are redundant.
Figes believes passionately that peer marriages are a happier variety than any that have gone before. Her dream couple is middle class, ethnically mixed, anti-stuff, both professionals. To support her case she has interviewed a right-on melange of the gay, straight, single, married, cohabiting and divorced.
Some of the stories she uncovers are fascinating. Take this example: a respectable middle-aged couple who decide to open up their marriage and sex life by letting the wife take younger lovers (starting with their handsome lodger) on the understanding that she then goes home and tells her husband all about it.
Unfortunately, rather than explaining how the pair dealt with jealousy or possessiveness, Figes zooms on just when the story is getting interesting, crowding out the narrative with lumpen theorising. Her general thesis is that romantic love, with its notion of “the one”, makes us think that relationships don’t need work, that once we’ve found the right person everything will be all right. Figes passionately believes this is not the case, and that faultlines that eventually crack them open could be healed if they were only tackled early enough. Conversely, she also believes that when partners become equals who can both walk away, then divorce “is a human right”. If handled correctly, she claims, divorce is fine for kids.
Marriage and how to reconcile it with women’s new rights and expectations is one of today’s key battlegrounds. Gilbert and Figes are both right to say that we are all in unknown territory here, but it’s the way they say it that makes the two books such a contrast. Figes has a great premise and has done some serious research, but her book is far from readable. By contrast, Gilbert has an elegance and lightness of touch that makes her slighter subject matter infinitely more compelling — I found myself guzzling Committed, reading it in mighty chunks, far into the night. Whenever I put it down, it was pinched by my mother or sister; Couples was left untouched.
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Published Date: 16 January 2010
By CURTIS SITTENFELD
COMMITTED: A Sceptic Makes Peace
With Marriage
By
Elizabeth Gilbert
Bloomsbury, 204pp, £12.99
ELIZABETH
Gilbert's 2006 memoir about her divorce and subsequent year spent travelling
through Italy, India and Indonesia, is as much a cultural phenomenon as it is a
mere bestseller.
Translated into 30 languages, Eat, Pray, Love, a women's book club favourite, is
being made into a film starring Julia Roberts, and already a number of women
have retraced her round-the-world journey.
Her new book picks up pretty much where Eat, Pray, Love left off, with Gilbert
in the arms of the boyfriend she pseudonymously calls Felipe – a debonair
Brazilian gemstone importer who had become an Australian citizen and met Gilbert
while he was living in Bali.
Felipe is older – 55 to her 37 when Committed starts – and the only fly in the
ointment is that visa restrictions mean they can't set up house together in the
US. Marriage is one way round that, of course, but both have been through a
divorce and neither of them particularly wants to get hitched. As they set off
travelling together, Gilbert starts researching the history of marriage, talking
about the subject with everyone she meets, from her own family members to
grannies in Vietnam.
As a tour guide to both Asia and matrimony, Gilbert is consistently entertaining
and illuminating and often funny, although some of the connections between her
brief firsthand experiences in Asia and the larger phenomena they are meant to
illustrate seem tenuous.
The book is rather chatty and personal for one so heavy on research, but then
it's rather researched to be so chatty and personal. Gilbert is equally likely
to quote Plato or her friend Ann, and equally keen to discuss how attitudes
toward marriage changed from the Old to the New Testament, how important –
according to evolutionary biologists – the vasopressin receptor gene is in
determining male fidelity, and how her own parents have managed to stay together
for more than 40 years.
While such shifts between the factual and the subjective shouldn't be inherently
problematic, they made me feel lost as a reader: where in the history of
marriage were we, and were we moving forward chronologically or thematically,
and how long had Gilbert and Felipe been travelling, and what month was it
again?
The slackness that permeates their days soon starts to spill into the pages. In
Eat, Pray, Love, Gilbert was on the run from an ugly divorce, and her story
contained the forward momentum of a quest and the juicy tension of unanswered
questions: would she attain personal equanimity? Would she put aside her doubts
and give in again to romance?
The central question of Committed is less of a nail-biter: will Gilbert be able
to overcome her aversion to marriage in order to live in the same country as the
man she deeply loves? If they had to marry but she didn't deeply love him – if,
say, she hated him yet was secretly drawn to his broad shoulders and rakish ways
– well, then you'd have some kind of plot.
But it's not giving anything away to say that of course Gilbert reconciles
herself to remarrying – the book's subtitle announces as much. This foregone
conclusion means that Committed often seems an intellectual exercise, an
internal rather than external journey, whereas Eat, Pray, Love succeeded in
being both.
For all that, Gilbert provides an abundance of interesting factoids: ancient
Roman law recognised marriage between aristocratic males, she says. Divorce
rates skyrocket when arranged marriages give way to "love marriages". Papua New
Guineans have a special category of songs about "marriages which never came to
pass but should have". Gilbert also shares practical tips, including a
remarkably clear and simple recipe, drawn from the research of the psychologist
Shirley P Glass, on how not to cheat on your spouse (the short version: don't
confide in anyone else more than you do in him or her). And Gilbert has written
some wonderfully memorable scenes, among them a description of the life of her
maternal grandmother, who was born in 1913 in central Minnesota with a cleft
palate and who, defying expectations, got married after all to a "staggeringly
handsome" farmer with whom she had seven children.
Another strong section is Gilbert's brutally honest depiction of an excursion to
Cambodia she takes without Felipe. Her frankness about the fact that the trip is
a disaster is all the braver given that Gilbert clearly prides herself on her
ability to navigate foreign countries. Then there's the delightful digression on
"aunties", or women who don't have children – Gilbert is childless by choice –
and the important role they play for their literal and figurative nieces and
nephews; it should be copied and given as a present to all such women. And
finally, for someone who compares wedding planning to preparing for a
colonoscopy, a surprisingly happy ending.
Thursday, January 7, 2010;
Profile of Elizabeth Gilbert, author of 'Eat, Pray, Love' and 'Committed'
By Ellen McCarthy
This week, Elizabeth Gilbert gave her Zen-chasing disciples what they'd been waiting for.
She published, finally, a follow-up to her sudden phenom of a memoir, "Eat, Pray, Love." The one where she traipsed across Italy, India and Indonesia looking for joy and God and love and the meaning of life. Because she found each, in one way or another, her book was translated into 30 languages, has been on the paperback bestseller list for 151 weeks and launched hordes of bliss-seeking women on a thousand similar trips. (Continues to launch, actually: The seven-day SpiritQuest Tour of Bali kicks off May 21. Meet Liz's medicine man! Meditate every morning!)
With the release of "Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage," Gilbert will confront the expectations of her fans, as must any author attempting a sequel to a beloved book. J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter acolytes demand, with each installment, to be mesmerized and enchanted, just as the "Twilight" lady's devotees wanted to be riveted and romanced.
As for Gilbert's followers, well, they just expect to, you know . . .
"To have their lives changed?" she suggests.
Yeah, actually. If it's not too much trouble.
In truth, Gilbert began working on this new book long before there was much hubbub over the last one.
Sitting in a chilly, closet-size office in Frenchtown, the idyllic New Jersey village where she now makes her home, Gilbert, 40, talks about the strangeness of her last decade. Having been a writer for 10 years already, she dared to tell a story about herself that somehow became about something more than herself. And the telling of it changed her story forever.
The Connecticut native started out as a men's-magazine writer of some renown (her piece about bartending in the East Village became "Coyote Ugly"). Beyond that, she had published a critically acclaimed collection of short stories ("Pilgrims"), a novel that became a New York Times Notable Book ("Stern Men") and was finishing "The Last American Man," a work of nonfiction about an eccentric naturalist.
But at age 30, as her literary standing grew, her marriage began to crumble. She writhed on her bathroom floor in a first-rate dark night of the soul. Then she asked for a divorce, threw herself into the arms of an unsuitable young lover, took to antidepressants and secured a book contract that would allow her to spend a year traveling the world, mending her broken spirit and journaling successive epiphanies.
On her last stop, Indonesia, Gilbert met a kindly older man from Brazil who was also suffering the aftershocks of a brutal divorce. They fell in love but -- to avoid a repeat of heartaches past -- vowed, as she writes, to "never, ever under any circumstances, marry."
The Brazilian, José Nunes (but known to readers as Felipe), followed her to the States where, after a brief layover in Knoxville, Tenn., they settled into a kind of sweet domesticity in suburban Philadelphia. She wrote "Eat, Pray, Love." He cooked for her and imported precious gemstones, leaving the country regularly to renew his visitor's visa.
In 2006, 25,000 hardcover copies of "Eat, Pray, Love" were printed and the memoir spent three weeks perched on the bestseller list, which "was fabulously exciting for me because I'd never been near anything like that with my previous books," Gilbert says, from the cardboard-box-filled office of Two Buttons, a warehouse-size Frenchtown retail shop where she and Nunes sell embroidered fabrics, mala beads, incense and all manner of carved stone deities.
Sales of the book sloped off and Gilbert set to work on her next project, an epic novel about development in the Amazon.
She was in the early stages of research for that book when Nunes was detained, after a visa-renewing jaunt out of the country, by Homeland Security Department officials at the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. Popping in and out of the country as he'd been doing was not legal, Nunes was told, and if he wanted to stay permanently they would have to marry.
"My heart sank, almost audibly," Gilbert writes of the moment she heard this news.
It would take months to complete the paperwork to allow them legally to wed in the United States, so the two sought exile in Asia. Gilbert scrapped the Amazon epic and told her publisher she'd like to work instead on another personal narrative, this time exploring the institution of marriage and her aversion to it.
"What was happening was more interesting than what I had been thinking of inventing," she says. Moreover, Gilbert had an issue that needed to be resolved, and writing was the most efficient method. "I could've gone to therapy about it," she quips, "but that's once a week for an hour."
* * *
In person Gilbert comes across much as she does in "Eat, Pray, Love": witty, warm and loquacious. She laughs loudly at her own jokes, which often hinge on the same subject: herself. Her absurdity or foolishness or eye-rolling idiosyncrasies. She sits petting Rocky, a mixed-breed rescue dog who's climbed onto her lap and muddied the loose nylon pants she's tucked into a pair of tall, waterproof boots. Gilbert has taken someone's mother's advice about layering, wrapping one charcoal sweater over another and twisting her blond curls haphazardly into two clips before pulling on a fleece headband. She wears no makeup, until the appearance of a photographer prompts a hurried swipe of lip gloss.
Back in 2006, while Gilbert and Nunes crisscrossed through Vietnam, Laos and Thailand, she steeped herself in academic texts on the history and meaning of marriage. The books had been sent by her sister, young-adult writer Catherine Gilbert Murdock. And as she did on her previous adventure, Gilbert insinuated herself into the lives of willing locals, hoping for some fresh perspective that might assuage her doubts about wedded bliss. (One of her biggest revelations comes early on in "Committed," when she concedes that she may have been asking too much of the institution all along -- "perhaps I was loading a far heavier cargo of expectation onto the creaky old boat of matrimony than that strange vessel had ever been built to accommodate in the first place.")
Ten months later, by the time Nunes was allowed back into the country, Gilbert was ready to marry.
The two set up camp in Frenchtown and days after his arrival, they wed. That same week, "Eat, Pray, Love" was released in paperback.
And then, she says, "it began."
* * *
Gilbert cannot explain it still, the wild propagation of her book. She can guess at why it resonated so deeply with so many (mostly women) readers. It has something to do with being a permission slip, she thinks: "You are actually really permitted to give yourself a little bit of time to contemplate what you would like the meaning of your life to be."
But she cannot be sure why her book, though it had plenty of detractors, has stayed on the bestseller list for almost three years (it's currently No. 6 in the New York Times paperback rankings). She can't fully comprehend why Oprah Winfrey would devote two full installments to the book. Or why it prompted women to e-mail her saying "Eat, Pray, Love" had inspired them to marry or divorce or quit their jobs or follow her tracks through Italy, India and Indonesia, eating where she ate, sleeping where she slept, trying to find the people she found.
"Somehow the book was really well timed in terms of an entire generation of women who perhaps didn't want to live in accord with the expectations of American society," says Gilbert's longtime editor, Paul Slovak. "Eat, Pray, Love" became their handbook, and Gilbert their guide.
But she hadn't sought that role, so the whole thing, Gilbert says, became like a giant parade passing by her kitchen window -- a spectacle with elephants and dancing girls and trumpets and drummers. It was right in front of her, but still outside.
"And every once in a while I walk by the window and I'm like, 'Oh, that's still going on? That parade?' And meanwhile I have to wash the dishes and do the laundry, take care of regular life," she says.
"It feels as though it long ago grew past having very much to do with me, if that makes sense. It took on its own life and its own identity," she continues. "Every once in a while I have to kind of put on my fancy shoes and be the ambassador of that event. But it's too big to be about me."
But some of Gilbert's friends say it was entirely about her -- about her extending the same disarming honesty and insight to readers that she'd previously shared only with them. "Liz always possessed an enormous amount of wisdom," says writer John Hodgman, a friend of more than a decade who found fame as a "Daily Show" wit and "I'm a PC" computer hawker. "I was very jealous of having to share her with the audience of Oprah."
But he understood the appeal; as an author and a person, Gilbert exhibited a kind of "courage and self-confidence," Hodgman says, "that made you want to imitate her. I certainly did. I would say 40 percent of everything I've written is an imitation of Liz Gilbert -- easily."
For a while Gilbert tried to reply to every e-mail, to ingest every tale of crisis or self-discovery readers shared at her book signings. She thought about hiring a personal assistant so her responses would be more substantive than "Cheers! Cheers on your divorce!" but ultimately decided that any existence requiring her to have a staff wasn't one worth having.
She tuned out the loaded accounts by women crediting her with transforming their lives. "I reached a point where I can't take in all those stories," she explains. "I can't hold it all."
Still, when she sat down to write "Committed" in a rented room above a Frenchtown laundromat, the parade was still going full force. There would be no way to ignore its raucous participants, she realized, but myriad ways to fail them.
"I didn't want any of these nice people -- who have been so good to me and made me wealthy and brought me prestige -- to make them disappointed," she recalls. To ensure that she didn't, Gilbert "sort of invited 6 million readers of 'Eat, Pray, Love' into my office with me to help me write my book, and I was consulting them at all times."
As her deadline bore down and her pages piled up (there would be more than 500 in the end), Gilbert felt entirely certain that what she'd written "was just awful." So bad, she says, that she couldn't stomach the thought of Nunes -- or anyone else -- reading it.
She drafted a letter to her publisher saying as much, and warning that she didn't know if she'd ever rewrite it. But it was more than that: Gilbert wasn't sure she'd ever write again.
"I thought, 'Well, maybe I'm just done with being a writer. Maybe the whole point of those 20 years that I've spent completely devoted to this work was to make this book that seems to be really important to people,' " she says. Now that it was done, Gilbert schemed, she could live out her days selling candles and Buddhas, or get a television show and become the kind of spiritual guru people seemed to want her to be.
What she did instead was dirty her hands in the garden.
After a summer of weeding and pruning, the desire to write came back to her as forcibly as when she was a girl, growing up on her parents' farm. It was the only thing Gilbert had ever wanted to do, a compulsion imbued in her lack of desire to have children -- an inclination became the central issue precipitating her divorce. "I, too, wanted to work. Uninterruptedly. Joyfully," she wrote of her decision not to become a mother. "How would I manage that, though, with a baby?"
The problem with the draft of "Committed," she realized, was that she'd written it in "an imitation of my own voice from years earlier. And I'd grown up a lot since then."
Gilbert returned to the room above the laundromat and began again. She wrote not with thousands of readers in mind, but instead invoked 25 women she knew well and respected. She filled the new manuscript with academic theories and studies she'd found interesting but cut from the earlier version for fear of alienating "Eat, Pray, Love" readers.
She finally wrote, she says, "the book I wished somebody had handed me that day in the Dallas-Fort Worth airport when I found out I had to get married."
* * *
Many of the people who revered "Eat, Pray, Love" won't care much for "Committed." Gilbert knows that.
The previous book, like a new romance, was tinged with passion, tension and a sense of mystical divination. The new one, like marriage, is weighted with realities, not all of them pleasant. ("Readers who delighted in the joie de vivre that bubbled throughout 'Eat, Pray, Love' may find this comparatively dreary," warned a San Francisco Chronicle reviewer.)
In some ways "Committed" is structured like a deal Gilbert is trying to strike with "Eat, Pray, Love" readers: "If you want the gossip of what happened with Liz and the Brazilian, you will get it," she says. "It's all in here. But in return you're gonna have to read, like, a dissertation on the history of marriage in Western civilization."
It won't be the sensation the last book was. It just won't. Nor will it revolutionize the lives of Gilbert's bliss-seeking readers. The author knows that, but is proud, she says, of having written "exactly the book I wanted to write in exactly the voice I think is appropriate."
"And the other thing is, you can't sanely expect or ask for that kind of reception twice in your life," she continues. "You can't even ask for it once -- you know, sanely."
Gilbert places a high value on sanity these days, in herself and her chosen corner of the universe. Turns out the marriage she so dreaded entering is a calm one, and her life with Nunes in Frenchtown (population: 1,454) is marked by long bike rides, a walking commute, plenty of naps and the embrace of a community filled with bakers, artists, craftsmen and yoga enthusiasts. When Two Buttons moved to a bigger location last fall, half the children of Frenchtown came out to escort a 6,000-pound Buddha statue to his new home. (The Enlightened One and the local postman, who happens to be from Bali, were both chauffeured by rickshaw.)
Gilbert suspects she'll look back one day and see this as her "Eat, Pray, Love" decade, with "Committed" its capstone. And the parade is waning, she thinks, though it will go on at least through the August release of a film based on the book. (That Julia Roberts will play Gilbert in the movie is -- like most things "Eat, Pray, Love"-related -- "so ludicrous that you don't even have to really bother to make sense of it," she says.) It will continue, too, with the eventual publication of a book by Gilbert's ex-husband, Michael Cooper, who signed a deal this summer to write his account of their divorce.
And it will clamor loudly for much of the next month as Gilbert travels the country (stopping Thursday night at the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue in the District), to talk -- at least ostensibly -- about "Committed."
But she knows that the folks who come out in the cold on a January night won't be there for "Committed." So the author of "Eat, Pray, Love" will be its ambassador once again.
And then as quickly as she can, she'll return to Frenchtown. To Nunes and Rocky and her next project, already taking shape.
"It's a novel," she says. "About gardening."
August 20, 2009
Titled “Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage,” the book is a memoir of a tumultuous year that came 18 months after “Eat, Pray, Love” leaves off, as well as a meditation on wedlock.
Ms. Gilbert, 40, said the book, which recounts how she came to marry the Brazilian-born Australian lover she met in Indonesia in “Eat, Pray, Love,” was not just a straightforward memoir of what happened and how she felt about it.
In exploring her deep ambivalence about marriage — having vowed never to remarry after the painful divorce that triggered the wanderings chronicled in “Eat, Pray, Love” — she read historical and sociological studies. She also interviewed family members and friends, and talked to people whom she and José Nunes (then her companion, called Felipe in the book), met during 10 months in Southeast Asia. In “Committed” she weaves her reflections on this material into her own experiences.
“It is and isn’t a sequel,” Ms. Gilbert said in a telephone interview from near their home in Frenchtown, N.J. “It’s the same two characters, but it’s a very different setting and emotional backdrop. The second book has more of an academic contemplation and more of my family in it.”
Given the phenomenal paperback success of “Eat, Pray, Love” — it spent 57 weeks at the No. 1 spot on the New York Times paperback nonfiction best-seller list and has remained on the list — the new title will be watched closely by fans and publishing insiders to see if Ms. Gilbert has lasting power.
Viking, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA), which published “Eat, Pray, Love” in 2006, is announcing a first print run for “Committed” of one million copies in hardcover. (Although such numbers are known to be widely exaggerated, they indicate the publisher’s ambitions.) According to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of sales, “Eat, Pray, Love” sold nearly four million copies in paperback.
When Ms. Gilbert signed a two-book deal with Viking for a novel and another work of nonfiction in 2006, “Eat, Pray, Love” had just been published in hardcover to mostly good reviews, but had not yet achieved its remarkable sales record. Ms. Gilbert thought she wanted to write a novel about the Amazon, and had a more amorphous idea for a nonfiction book about creativity.
But in May of that year, Ms. Gilbert said, Mr. Nunes was detained in Dallas as the couple were returning from a trip to France. After hours of questioning, immigration officials told the couple that the simplest way for Mr. Nunes to be allowed back into the country was for them to marry.
With divorce behind them both, neither wanted marriage. But they did want to build a life in the United States. Mr. Nunes had already established a business importing gemstones and jewelry to the United States, and Ms. Gilbert said she wanted to have a home base near her American family. As they waited to clear the bureaucratic hurdles to gain Mr. Nunes’s re-entry into the United States, the couple traveled to Australia, Bali, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. Out of this exile a book idea about marriage was born.
“I spent about 10 months trying to learn as much as I could possibly learn about this very frustrating, contradictory and ultimately interesting human habit,” Ms. Gilbert said. “I was trying to wrap my mind around it or gain enough perspective to feel that I could gain a place within it that didn’t feel coerced.”
The couple finally got permission for Mr. Nunes to re-enter the United States in 2007, and they married that year. Ms. Gilbert started writing a book she tentatively called “Weddings and Evictions.” In late 2007 Viking promoted it in the back of at least 200,000 copies of “Eat, Pray, Love,” describing it as a memoir about Ms. Gilbert’s “unexpected journey into second marriage” and promising publication in 2009.
When she finished a draft in May 2008, she took it to a copy shop to print out a first version. As soon as she began paging through it, she recoiled. “It was different from just the anxiety and insecurities that you feel when you’re writing something,” she said. “It was nondebatable.”
Without showing it to Paul Slovak, Viking’s publisher and Ms. Gilbert’s editor, she wrote asking for a deferral on her deadline. Mr. Slovak, although concerned that the follow-up to the blockbuster not take too long, gave her another year.
Ms. Gilbert said she never could read the first draft in its entirety. She identified the problem as a clash of two voices: one, “an ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ hangover,” — the chatty, witty tone that earned Ms. Gilbert her good reviews and loyal fans — and the other, “more sober and considered and confident and mature.”
After taking six months off, Ms. Gilbert decided she could write again, this time in what she believed was a more authentic voice. “I was scared that all the people who loved ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ might not want to read that new voice,” she said. “But I knew that if I didn’t do it that way it would just be a lousy book.”
Mr. Slovak, who never saw the original draft, said the new book, which runs around 300 pages, had retained the familiar tone of the earlier work. “It’s unmistakably her voice in this new book,” he said.
Ms. Gilbert knows that some knives may be out for her as she embarks on the publicity for the new memoir.
“There’s something very scary about having millions of people waiting to see what you’re going to do next,” she said. “The people who love ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ are very dear and are very encouraging, but they also have their expectations.”
“But the impossibilities of meeting the expectations of millions of people,” she added, “have been well chronicled.”
Monday, March 30, 2009
'Eat, Pray, Love' -- and Talk to Fans
By David
Montgomery
They have come from as far as New York and Durham, N.C., their hopes and their hurts in tow, seeking enlightenment and autographs. The line forms nearly two hours before showtime and stretches from the gates of Washington National Cathedral out onto its lawn. The arrivals, most of whom are women, paid as much as $22 each to spend their Friday evening this way.
When all 2,250 make it to their seats inside the sanctuary -- some with views partially obstructed by pillars -- Samuel T. Lloyd III, dean of the cathedral, welcomes the throng. "It's not quite like this every Sunday," he says. "I wish it would be."
But then, writer Elizabeth Gilbert isn't in the house every Sunday, and this isn't church. Friday's gathering takes place at the great American crossroads of books and buzz, art and personality, life and death.
The preacher in his black suit and white collar yields the microphone to the writer in her black dress and knee-high boots. Just the sight of her -- before she speaks, just that serene, slightly mischievous smile, as if she and the audience share a great secret -- causes the crowd to burst into applause and cheers.
"Nice place," Gilbert says, pausing to admire the soaring neo-Gothic setting.
Beats the bookstore circuit. The space is powerful in a different sort of way from the set of "The Oprah Winfrey Show," where she has appeared twice -- both times to talk about what we're going to talk about again tonight:
"Eat, Pray, Love." It's the title of Gilbert's not-so-new book, as well as a mantra for publishing success.
When the attendees go home, they will undoubtedly talk about it some more. And they will sow the multiple autographed copies they obtain tonight among their friends, who will talk about it with their friends, who probably already talked about it in their book clubs over wine and olives.
This has been going for three years, ever since Gilbert published her uncanny memoir of crashing in near-suicidal post-divorce depression and insecurity, then recovering through a year of travel, reflection and new friends. The subtitle is, "One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia." The subtext is: You can do it, sister.
The paperback has taken up permanent residence on bestseller lists. There are more than 7 million copies in print in more than 30 languages. Columbia Pictures hopes to have the movie out sometime next year, and hopes the likes of Julia Roberts will star.
How does this happen? What is it about this book?
Gilbert doesn't know, exactly. She refers to "the weird success of 'Eat, Pray, Love.' "
"The last time I was here," she says, returning from her neo-Gothic reverie, then launching into the story of visiting the Washington Cathedral with her family when she was 9, and how she wanted to return to their low-ceiling Connecticut farmhouse and redecorate her bedroom to look like the cathedral. The result didn't live up to the picture in her mind.
That's what writing a book is like, continues Gilbert, 39. (She has published four of them; the movie "Coyote Ugly" was based on one of her magazine pieces.) To the writer, she says, the result is somewhat disappointing, never quite the cathedral you set out to build. Except, with "Eat, Pray, Love," millions of readers found just the cathedral they were looking for.
"When the miraculous, wondrous, impossible thing happens," she says, "and you put a book out to the world, and people actually love it, and actually care about it, and actually respond to it, it is so moving and so strange to have that occur that it's difficult for me to even express what I'm trying to get at -- which is the extreme level of my gratitude to all of you, for basically looking at my book and blurring your eyes and seeing the cathedral in a child's bedroom."
If the author is humbled and puzzled, the readers have more of a clue about what this book means to them.
"How do you tell somebody, 'Thank you for teaching me how to pray?' " says Fatima Nawaz, 28, a researcher in infectious diseases, who has come from New York.
"I was going through the same experience she went through," including a divorce, says Alesia Balshakova, 29, a lawyer who traveled from Durham, N.C. "I was praying for God to show me the way through, and this book showed up in my life."
They like how honest and raw it is, bravely embracing varieties of the human condition -- from wailing on the bathroom floor in a puddle of snot, to gorging on the world's best double-mozzarella pizza, to catching fleeting glimpses of divinity through meditation, to having great sex on the beach.
Jackie Carl, 27, a marketer for a regional theater, received the book a few years ago from her mother, when the young woman had just moved to Washington and was having career and boyfriend angst. The book helped. Then Carl got it for her sibling Susie, 25, a Navy nurse, as a way of passing on sisterly advice without being preachy. Susie Carl passed the book on to a fellow nurse now deployed in Kuwait. Susie also bought tickets to the cathedral event as a present for Jackie. There, Susie gets Gilbert to sign a postcard to her friend in Kuwait, while Jackie gets extra books signed to give to more friends.
And on and on.
"It's a book about an independent woman finding strength," Jackie Carl says. "Just because you're 24 or 25 and don't have it doesn't mean you're wrong or you're lost."
Gilbert surveys her audience. She's a chatty, wisecracking raconteur. Her stories tonight are all about herself, just as "Eat, Pray, Love" is, but self-deprecation and humor help prick little balloons of self-regard.
"There are a couple men here, that's so lovely!" she says. "I hope you knew you were coming."
Some of the guys are here basically as ornaments for the women. But some, like Rob Otterstatter, 38 -- who lives in Stafford, works in law enforcement and was practically first in line -- came because they really wanted to. He and his 91-year-old grandmother exchange books, and she passed him "Eat, Pray, Love." His wife thought that was funny because it was such a "girlie" book, he says, then he got her to read it.
"Some aspects of it pertain to everyone's personal journey," says the guy, with a certain guy-like vagueness.
Professionals in the bookselling and writing business have their own theories on the power of "Eat, Pray, Love."
"It is in some ways a spiritual book in the Oprah way," says Richard McCann, a fiction writer who teaches a course in memoir at American University. "But in some ways it's a very American book in the pre-19th century tradition in American literature of self-improvement through nonfiction. . . . It's kind of where Ben Franklin meets Walt Whitman. That's not an unappealing kind of bridge to cross."
The book is a reliable seller even among the sophisticates who shop at independent bookstores. "I can tell you that we've sold almost 1,400 copies of it in paperback and 145 hardbacks," says Carla Cohen, co-owner of Politics and Prose. Cohen has not read the book.
"Anytime around Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Christmas, you always see a bump in sales," says Todd Stewart, co-owner of Vertigo Books, who also has not read it. "People are obviously buying it to give to people they think should read it."
Vertigo also sells the parody, published this year by comedy writer Andrew Gottlieb, that mimics the cover art of "Eat, Pray, Love," but has an off-color spoof title, followed by the subtitle "One Man's Search for Anything Across Ireland, Vegas, and Thailand."
Ah, yes, the backlash. Some people can't stand all the self-referential sincerity. It's a point of book-club debate and sociological essays. "This is the kind of literature that countless women soak up like biscotti in a latte cup: food, clothes, sex, 'relationships' and gummy, feel-good 'spirituality,' " writer Charlotte Allen wrote last year in The Post's Outlook section.
Grace Lichtenstein, who reviewed the book for The Post in 2006, expressed misgivings over literary cuteness before giving the book a grudging thumbs-up: "She's a gutsy gal, this Liz, flaunting her psychic wounds and her search for faith in a pop-culture world, and her openness ultimately rises above its glib moments."
Other reviewers raved, and the sneerers seem to be in the minority: On Amazon.com last night, the parody version was ranked in sales at No. 40,279, while "Eat, Pray, Love" stood at No. 119.
The vibes are all good at the cathedral Friday night. The lecture and discussion, moderated by novelist Susan Richards Shreve, are co-hosted by the PEN/Faulkner Foundation and the Cathedral College. Gilbert is speaking free of charge, so proceeds can go to those institutions.
Gilbert catches everybody up on her life since the last scene in the book, when she was wading ashore at a remote Indonesian island with her Brazilian lover.
"I want to save half of you the trouble of asking whether I married the Brazilian guy," she says. "Yes, I married the Brazilian guy." The audience applauds.
The couple live in New Jersey, where they own an import business while she writes.
Gently, ever so gently, she informs her fans that she, for one, is moving on from "Eat, Pray, Love." She doesn't have time for yoga and meditation anymore, though she does take daily "silence baths" with her cat, which, she says, "purists" might call "napping."
"I think you're going to have to find another spiritual role model," she says.
Moving on is spiritually healthy and necessary, but it's not easy. She threw out a 500-page manuscript of a new book about marriage when she realized the voice was wrong. It was "this curious unholy amalgamation between the way I speak and think and live now and this hangover of an 'Eat, Pray, Love' voice that I had sort of outgrown. Having never before written a book with a lot of people anticipating it, I sort of felt with every sentence: What would the people who like 'Eat, Pray, Love' think?"
She feared perhaps she had been put on Earth to achieve "Eat, Pray, Love" and then find other work. She took months off from writing. Then one day a sentence came to her, and the writing started to flow again. "I didn't need to think about pleasing 'Eat, Pray, Love' fans. I didn't need to think about my literary reputation. I just had to take that first sentence and write it down, and ask it what the next sentence should be, because it knows already."
The "Eat, Pray, Love" fans in the cathedral don't feel jilted. They're spiritually packing for the next trip.
"I like that she has matured, she is now on a different level," says Balshakova, the lawyer from Durham, who gets her picture taken with Gilbert after the event. "She's gone a long way. It seems she never ceases to do internal work. She doesn't let her soul be lazy."
"Eat, Pray, Love" and Women on the Road
GUEST BLOGGERS: Susan Pohlman and Margaret Feinberg
Elizabeth Gilbert's best-selling memoir, "Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia," has inspired other women to hit the road on a quest for self-discovery. Two women who followed Gilbert's lead are Susan Pohlman, author of "Halfway to Each Other: How a Year in Italy Brought Our Family Home" (Guideposts Book) and Margaret Feinberg, whose memoir is called "Scouting the Divine: My Search for God in Wool, Wine, and Wild Honey" (Zondervan/HarperCollins). We asked Pohlman and Feinberg to reflect on their personal journeys.
By Susan Pohlman
Great memoirs like Elizabeth Gilbert's "Eat, Pray, Love" are helping us
visualize an unstructured life journey and realize that, yes, we can give voice
to our restlessness and take control of our own stories. Today, women -
historically left off the lists of the great explorers that shaped history - are
gathering courage and venturing out on their own. Along the way, we are
celebrating a sense of renewal and self-redefinition by sharing our experiences
with others.
No one was more shocked than I was at my sudden departure from convention. I was a product of an era that espoused duty, service to others, and raising my hand when I had a question. Rules were to be followed - it was the path to the American Dream. Any fool knew that love looked like June and Ward Cleaver. What Mike and Carol Brady had to deal with was a stretch, but even they found happiness and order with the help of Alice. I was devastated when, after I had recreated those beloved TV scenes in my own life, the director kept yelling, "Cut! Where's the deep joy, Susan? Try it again, and this time, stop grimacing."
One day, at the grocery check-out, I became suddenly, soulfully, aware that the endpoint of my life would be a plain old period. I would never win the exclamation point reserved for the exhilarating lives of the movie stars whose photos taunted me from the magazine covers. Peering around, I saw lines of distracted faces and far away eyes. This was the sum of a life spent following the rules. I considered tying the plastic bag over my head then politely asking the shoppers around me to ignore my choking sounds.
As a young wife and mother, I read the books and articles on how to nurture a marriage and a family. Not once did I see "adventure" named as a basic human need. Now I believe that it was a devastating omission on the authors' part. Had I understood the psychology of adventure, I would not have spent years consciously and subconsciously blaming my husband for my own boredom. Like it was his fault that my choices did not include soul-stretching escapades.
In 2003, my husband and I chose adventure together rather than ending our marriage. We stepped out of our ordered life in Los Angeles and into the disarray of the unknown. We moved our children to Italy on a whim and a prayer, desperate to keep our family together. I didn't know at the time what was missing between us, only that we were exhausted from trying to figure it out. Venturing out into the world without a plan, we discovered the restorative power of travel and the intimacy it creates. It was the salve that healed a myriad of wounds. We will never live without it again.
By Margaret Feinberg
I
can't help but agree with Augustine, "The world is a book and those who do not
travel read only one page." With the relative ease of travel these days compared
to thirty or fifty years ago, it's no wonder women are taking to the road to
discover more about the world--and themselves. Elizabeth Gilbert opened up our
imaginations to the notion that one of the most powerful ways to capture an
honest snapshot of our true selves is through immersion in a different culture.
When we take to the road to taste, touch, see, and experience new places we
uncover hidden facets of ourselves--truths we could not discover any other way.
Rather than traveling overseas, I chose to search for spiritual truths in an agrarian setting in the United States. My four-part journey included observing a modern day shepherdess who cared for a flock outside her Oregon home, walking the fields of a Nebraska farm, exploring the mysteries of a bee colony in Colorado and discovering the intricacies of pruning with a vintner in Napa Valley.
Why did I go? Because I am increasingly aware that the earthy culture of the Bible is very far removed from the modern suburban world. There's so much I wanted to touch and taste and feel and understand. With each stop, I asked those I encountered to respond to passages of scripture not as theologians but as observers of everyday life. Their answers illuminated spiritual truths I had never recognized. Each leg of the journey answered spiritual questions yet raised many more. Among warm living rooms and wet fields, I found myself asking tough questions of my companions, myself, and God. Through this spiritual adventure, I discovered that however fractured my faith may be, hope remains--a hope I did not know I possessed before I ventured off.
My wish is that other women (and men) will scout the divine or embark on whatever journey they need to learn more about themselves. It's amazing what clarity emerges when you step outside the familiar--and how the pages of our lives turn into chapters, books, and volumes of personal growth.
PORTUGAL:
Elizabeth Gilbert, Comer, Orar, Amar: Comer na Itália, Orar na Índia, Amar na Indonésia, Bertrand Editora, ISBN: 9789722515030
February 26, 2006
This is easy to believe. If a more likable writer than Gilbert is currently in print, I haven't found him or her. And I don't mean this as consolation prize, along the lines of: but she's really, really nice. I mean that Gilbert's prose is fueled by a mix of intelligence, wit and colloquial exuberance that is close to irresistible, and makes the reader only too glad to join the posse of friends and devotees who have the pleasure of listening in. Her previous work of nonfiction, "The Last American Man" (she's also the author of a fine story collection and a novel), was a portrait of a modern-day wilderness expert that became an evocative meditation on the American frontier, and was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2002.
Here, Gilbert's subject is herself. Reeling from a contentious divorce, a volatile rebound romance and a bout of depression, she decided at 34 to spend a year traveling in Italy, India and Indonesia. "I wanted to explore one aspect of myself set against the backdrop of each country, in a place that has traditionally done that one thing very well," she writes. "I wanted to explore the art of pleasure in Italy, the art of devotion in India and, in Indonesia, the art of balancing the two." Her trip was financed by an advance on the book she already planned to write, and "Eat, Pray, Love" is the mixed result.
At its best, the book provides an occasion for Gilbert to unleash her fresh, oddball sensibility on an international stage. She describes Messina, Italy, as "a scary and suspicious Sicilian port town that seems to howl from behind barricaded doors, 'It's not my fault that I'm ugly! I've been earthquaked and carpet-bombed and raped by the Mafia, too!' " Later, she sees a Balinese mother "balancing on her head a three-tiered basket filled with fruit and flowers and a roasted duck — a headgear so magnificent and impressive that Carmen Miranda would have bowed down in humility before it." Gilbert also takes pleasure in poking fun at herself. At an Indian ashram, she winningly narrates the play of her thoughts while she tries to meditate: "I was wondering where I should live once this year of traveling has ended. . . . If I lived somewhere cheaper than New York, maybe I could afford an extra bedroom and then I could have a special meditation room! That'd be nice. I could paint it gold. Or maybe a rich blue. No, gold. No, blue. . . . Finally noticing this train of thought, I was aghast. I thought: . . . How about this, you spastic fool — how about you try to meditate right here, right now, right where you actually are?"
"Eat, Pray, Love" is built on the notion of a woman trying to heal herself from a severe emotional and spiritual crisis; Gilbert suggests more than once that she was at risk for suicide. But where she movingly rendered up the tortured inner life of Eustace Conway, the gigantically flawed subject of "The Last American Man," Gilbert has a harder time when it comes to Gilbert. Often she short shrifts her own emotional state for the sake of keeping the reader entertained: "They come upon me all silent and menacing like Pinkerton detectives," she writes of feeling depressed and lonely in Italy, "and they flank me — Depression on my left, Loneliness on my right. They don't need to show me their badges. I know these guys very well. We've been playing a cat-and-mouse game for years now. . . . Then Loneliness starts interrogating me. . . . He asks why I can't get my act together, and why I'm not at home living in a nice house and raising nice children like any respectable woman my age should be."
But wait a second — Gilbert is a New York journalist who has spent the prior several years traveling the world on assignment. In her chosen milieu, it would be unusual if she were married and raising kids in a house at age 34 — by her own account, she left her husband precisely to avoid those things. I'm willing to believe that Gilbert despaired over having failed at a more conventional life even as she sought out its opposite — complications like these are what make us human. But she doesn't tell that story here, or even acknowledge the paradox. As a result, her crisis remains a shadowy thing, a mere platform for the actions she takes to alleviate it.
What comes through much more strongly is her charisma. On a trip to Indonesia well before her year of travel, she visited a Balinese medicine man who read her palm and proclaimed: "You have more good luck than anyone I've ever met. You will live a long time, have many friends, many experiences. . . . You only have one problem in your life. You worry too much." He then invited her to spend several months in Bali as his protégé. At another point, Gilbert petitions God to move her husband to sign their divorce agreement and gets a nearly instant result; later she devotes a love hymn to her nephew, whose sleep problems, she learns the next week, have abruptly ceased. Putting aside questions of credibility, the problem with these testaments to Gilbert's good luck and personal power is that they undercut any sense of urgency about her future. "Eat, Pray, Love" suffers from a case of low stakes; one reads for the small vicissitudes of Gilbert's journey — her struggle to accept the end of her failed rebound relationship; her ultimately successful efforts to meditate; her campaign to help a Balinese woman and her daughter buy a home — never really doubting that things will come right. But even Gilbert's sassy prose is flattened by the task of describing her approach to the divine, and the midsection of the book, at the ashram, drags.
By the time she reaches Indonesia, Gilbert herself admits that the stated purpose of the visit has already been accomplished. "The task in Indonesia was to search for balance," she writes, "but . . . the balance has somehow naturally come into place." There would seem to be only one thing missing — romance — and she soon finds that with a Brazilian man 18 years her senior who calls her "darling" and says things like, "You can decide to feel how you want to, but I love you and I will always love you." Gilbert acknowledges the "almost ludicrously fairy-tale ending to this story," but reminds us, "I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue."
Rescue from what? The reader has never been sure. Lacking a ballast of gravitas or grit, the book lists into the realm of magical thinking: nothing Gilbert touches seems to turn out wrong; not a single wish goes unfulfilled. What's missing are the textures and confusion and unfinished business of real life, as if Gilbert were pushing these out of sight so as not to come off as dull or equivocal or downbeat. When, after too much lovemaking, she is stricken with a urinary tract infection, she forgoes antibiotics and allows her friend, a Balinese healer, to treat the infection with noxious herbs. "I suffered it down," Gilbert writes. "Well, we all know how the story ends. In less than two hours I was fine, totally healed." The same could be said about "Eat, Pray, Love": we know how the story ends pretty much from the beginning. And while I wouldn't begrudge this massively talented writer a single iota of joy or peace, I found myself more interested, finally, in the awkward, unresolved stuff she must have chosen to leave out.
Sunday, February 12, 2006
Heart and Soul
In this memoir, a young divorcee searches the world
for spiritual awakening.
Reviewed by Grace Lichtenstein
EAT, PRAY, LOVE
One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy,
India and Indonesia
By Elizabeth Gilbert
Viking. 334 pp. $24.95
The only thing wrong with this readable, funny memoir of a magazine writer's yearlong travels across the world in search of pleasure and balance is that it seems so much like a Jennifer Aniston movie.
Like Jen, Liz is a plucky blond American woman in her thirties with no children and no major money worries. As the book opens, she is going through a really bad divorce and subsequent stormy rebound love affair. Awash in tears in the middle of the night on the floor of the bathroom, she begins to pray for guidance, "you know -- like, to God ." God answers. He tells her to go back to bed.
I started seeing the Star headlines: "Jen's New Faith!" "What Really Happened at the Ashram!" "Jen's Brazilian Sugar Daddy -- Exclusive Photos!"
Please understand that Gilbert, whose earlier nonfiction book, The Last American Man , portrayed a contemporary frontiersman, is serious about her quest. But because she never leaves her self-deprecating humor at home, her journey out of depression and toward belief lacks a certain gravitas. The book is composed of 108 short chapters (based on the beads in a traditional Indian japa mala prayer necklace) that often come across as scenes in a movie. And however sad she feels or however deeply she experiences something, she can't seem to avoid dressing up her feelings in prose that can get too cute and too trite. On the other hand, she convinced me that she acquired more wisdom than most young American seekers -- and did it without peyote buttons or other classic hippie medicines.
When Gilbert determines that she requires a year of healing, her first stop is Italy, because she feels she needs to immerse herself in a language and culture that worships pleasure and beauty. This sets the stage for a "Jen's Romp in Rome," where she studies Italian and, with newfound friends, searches for the best pizza in the world. It's a considerable achievement because she is still stalked by Depression and Loneliness, which she casts as "Pinkerton Detectives" -- Depression, the wise guy, and Loneliness, "the more sensitive cop." They frisk her, "empty my pockets of any joy I had been carrying" and relentlessly interrogate her about why she thinks she deserves a vacation, considering what a mess she's made of her life.
After literally eating herself out of depression, she returns to the United States for Christmas holidays. Next stop: the ashram. It seems Gilbert has been a student of yoga and meditation for years.
Her rural Indian experience features Gilbert grappling mightily with some of the meditative practices. She finds quirky co-practitioners such as Richard from Texas, a former truck driver, alcoholic and Birkenstock dealer. Richard nicknames her "Groceries" because of her appetite at meals and offers wise advice. Picture Willie Nelson in a non-singing cameo role.
Gilbert acknowledges that Americans have had difficulty accepting the idea of meditation and gurus, and she does a mostly fine job in making her ashram education accessible. She deftly sketches the physical stress of sitting in one position for hours, as well as the metaphysical stress of staying on message. Still, Gilbert sounds like a giddy teenager as she describes her relationship with Swamiji, the yogi who founded the ashram where she is studying: "I'm finding that all I want is Swamiji. All I feel is Swamiji. . . . It's the Swamiji channel, round the clock."
The concluding 36 beads find Gilbert in Bali, palling around with an ageless medicine man who looks like Yoda, a Balinese mother and nurse, Wayan, who is a refugee from domestic violence, and other colorful characters. Gilbert is healed enough by now to render a really good deed: She raises $18,000 via e-mail from American friends for Wayan to buy a house. ("Jen: Bigger Do-Gooder Than Brad?") And after 18 months of self-imposed celibacy, she finds mature, truer love thanks to a charming older Brazilian businessman.
Eat, Pray, Love as a whole actually is better than its 108 beads. By the time she and her lover sailed into a Bali sunset, Gilbert had won me over. She's a gutsy gal, this Liz, flaunting her psychic wounds and her search for faith in a pop-culture world, and her openness ultimately rises above its glib moments. Memo to Jen -- option this book. ·
Grace Lichtenstein is a travel writer and author of six books who lives in New York and Santa Fe, N.M.
Los Angeles Times
February 19, 2006
Three-part harmony
Eat, Pray, Love One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia Elizabeth Gilbert Viking: 334 pp., $24.95
Erika Schickel
"I don't want to be married anymore. I don't want to live in this big house. I don't want to have a baby." This is the dark mantra Elizabeth Gilbert repeated while prostrate on her bathroom floor, alone and sobbing, as her estranged husband slept in another room. Trapped in the soul-crushing pursuit of living somebody else's dream, she beseeched God to tell her what to do. A voice answered: "Go back to bed, Liz."
An acrimonious
divorce and a tragic love affair ensued. From this nadir, Gilbert, journalist
and author of three books ("Pilgrims," "Stern Men" and "The Last American Man")
went from knowing what she didn't want to exploring what she did want, as
she writes in "Eat, Pray, Love." She wanted to speak Italian ("it was the only
thing I could imagine bringing me any pleasure right now") and she wanted a
spiritual teacher. While on assignment in Indonesia, Gilbert tells a Balinese
medicine man, "I want to be with God all the time. But I don't want to be a
monk, or totally give up worldly pleasures."
The medicine man tells her she will one day return to Bali, and this is all the permission she needs to give up her job and life in New York and embark on a yearlong quest for balance and self-realization. But she finds herself sorting through conflicting impulses: "What was more important? The part of me that wanted to eat veal in Venice? Or the part of me that wanted to be waking up long before dawn in the austerity of an Ashram to begin a long day of meditation and prayer?.... As for how to balance the urge for pleasure against the longing for devotion ... well, surely there was a way to learn that trick ... I maybe could learn this from the Balinese." She sets out to explore these different aspects of her nature, spending four months each in Italy, India and Indonesia.
Threes are powerful numbers "as anyone who has ever studied either the Holy Trinity or a simple barstool can plainly see." Gilbert ups the karmic ante further by organizing her book into three sections with 36 tales each (which she wrote in her 36th year). Altogether, there are 108 chapters (a three-digit multiple of three), which equal the number of prayer beads on a japa mala, used by Buddhists during meditation. "Eat, Pray, Love" is in fact a meditation on love in its many forms: love of food, language, humanity, God and, most meaningful for Gilbert, love of self.
Erika Schickel is the author of the forthcoming "You're Not the Boss of Me."
March 10, 2010
Terri Apter
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