Committed

Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage by Elizabeth Gilbert

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really enjoy Liz Gilbert’s style and humor. I found her examination of the history and culture of marriage quite fascinating. I like her candor in discussing her inner thoughts and fears. And as a 58-year-old single woman, I really appreciated her thoughts on single women, and on the value of what “aunts” give to the world. Even in the U.S. in this day and age, to marry or not isn’t always a choice. She gives voice to the marriage equality struggle of LGBT folks, and the reassurance that marriage always has been and always will be changing and evolving.

Description: At the end of her memoir Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert fell in love with Felipe, a Brazilian living in Indonesia. The couple swore eternal love, but also swore (as skittish divorce survivors) never to marry. However, providence intervened in the form of a U.S. government ultimatum: get married, or Felipe could never enter America again. Told with Gilbert’s trademark humor and intelligence, this fascinating meditation on compatibility and fidelity chronicles Gilbert’s complex and sometimes frightening journey into second marriage, and will enthrall the millions of readers who made Eat, Pray, Love a number one bestseller.

Eat, Pray, Love

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was bookclub pick that I really didn’t want to read. I had heard all the negative reviews about the book and movie. So I was pleasantly surprised. While I wouldn’t make the choices the author did – and let’s face it, most of us do not have either the money or the time to take a year out of our lives to go to such extremes in our search for self and happiness – I wouldn’t necessarily call her self-absorbed and narcissistic. We all make this journey at some point in our lives. She writes with honesty and humor about herself and the people she meets along the way. And in the end she is able to get out of her own way enough to raise money to help a struggling woman buy a house and even finds love when she has stopped looking for it. I would like to find out how this love story continues in her follow-up book “Committed.”

Description: This beautifully written, heartfelt memoir touched a nerve among both readers and reviewers. Elizabeth Gilbert tells how she made the difficult choice to leave behind all the trappings of modern American success (marriage, house in the country, career) and find, instead, what she truly wanted from life. Setting out for a year to study three different aspects of her nature amid three different cultures, Gilbert explored the art of pleasure in Italy and the art of devotion in India, and then a balance between the two on the Indonesian island of Bali. By turns rapturous and rueful, this wise and funny author (whom Booklist calls “Anne Lamott’s hip, yoga- practicing, footloose younger sister”) is poised to garner yet more adoring fans.