Word: gilberte
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Elizabeth Gilbert does these reluctant wives one better. The author of Eat, Pray, Love returns with Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage (Viking; 285 pages), in which she is a vehemently wary second-time bride, due to be dragged down the aisle by Uncle Sam's immigration henchmen, who will otherwise toss her beloved, Brazilian-born "Felipe," as she calls the older man she met in the last section of EPL, out of the U.S. for good. They hadn't planned to marry. Like Gilbert, Felipe had endured a hard divorce, and they were content to be "lifers" together...
...Gilbert cites statistics, scientific studies and her painful experience with her first marriage - the impetus for the worldwide spiritual ramble of EPL - as her reasons for not wanting to tie the knot. She demonstrates how the institution threatens her independence and the well-being of many women. Her fears hold up even when she's considering union with a man who loves her, excuses her memoirist tendencies and has been known to tell her that the curves of her body "look like sand dunes...
...whereas in Eat, Pray, Love the journey was what mattered, the end of Committed is, as of page 18, a foregone conclusion. As Gilbert puts it, she and her lover are "sentenced to marry." This makes the book a supreme act of navel-gazing, even for a memoir. While the legal complexities are being worked out, the two kill time by traveling together. Along the way, Gilbert, ever the good journalist, gathers string on marriage and love from various sources, including the humble Hmong women of North Vietnam, seagulls, a humble frog-farming family in Laos and her humble...
...they ever had. And that has both complicated and weakened and made more interesting the institution of marriage. Anybody who thinks that we're going to return to some sort of more tribal, feudal version of building marriages is operating from a very strange compass indeed. (Read about Elizabeth Gilbert in the TIME...
...well? I can tell you that there will not be. I don't even know if anybody would be interested in it, but I think I wouldn't be interested in it. One movie about you per lifetime is probably plenty. It's not going to be like Liz Gilbert and the Sorcerer's Stone. (See 25 people who mattered...