Word: woman
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...humble frog-farming family in Laos and her humble 96-year-old Grandma Maude back in Minnesota. (Gilbert practices humility with vigor, even when sweetly patronizing Third World cultures.) Her process is exhaustive, and the results are exhausting, though some of her points are astute. This slog through one woman's relationship angst feels, in the end, like much ado about nothing...
...herself, quoting her sister Catherine's response to her gushy e-mails from Bali: "Yeah, I was planning to go to a tropical island this weekend with my Brazilian lover, too ... but then there was all that traffic.") There was no denying, however, that she was a vibrant woman on a cool adventure, with stories to tell. The pressure to return to that fertile ground must have been enormous. Just as she was sentenced to marrying, she was sentenced to sequel writing. (See questions and answers about retirement...
Committed gives us a woman trapped in a command performance she's too smart not to be dubious about. She seems self-conscious about the need to remain everyone's best friend, littering her prose with chirpy asides ("Listen, I want to make it clear here that I am not intrinsically against passion. Mercy, no!") and cutesy interjections ("Just a little free advice there, from your Auntie Liz"). Then there are the apologies for anything that might offend. Her eloquent defense of gay marriage, for instance, is diminished by this chatty advisory: "You see where I'm heading with this...
Gilbert also repeats, incessantly, information she's already conveyed, whether it be the vastness of the belly of a pregnant woman she's dining with or the details of a coat - wine-colored, with a fur collar - once owned by her grandmother. (We hear about its beauty four times in three pages.) There are useful insights into the dilemma of modern marriage here, but the overall effect of the heavily padded Committed is like that of being called, over and over, by a friend who wants to talk your ear off about her impending nuptials. Only instead of debating...
...history, a meaning they say wasn't seriously questioned until the past 10 years. "Save for a few brief months between the California Supreme Court's decision ... and the adoption of Proposition 8, California has from its inception always limited marriage to the union of a man and a woman," wrote Charles Cooper, who served in the Reagan Administration's Justice Department with Olson, in his trial brief Dec. 7. "Indeed, until this decade, every State, nation and civilized society in every period of history had always limited marriage to opposite-sex relationships ... Contrary to Plaintiffs' contentions, the traditional definition...