I read Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert's first memoir, a year or two ago and had mixed feelings about it. I think I agreed with most of my fellow book clubbers who thought she was self-indulgent, weepy, and slightly immature. However, I also remember liking her conversational writing style and self-deprecating wit, and relating to some of her desires-- for travel, for romance, and especially for good food. I read about her second memoir, kind of a follow-up to the first, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage in O magazine's summer reading list and am SO glad I decided to read it. It's funny that Erin recently read a self-help book that escaped the stigmas of being self-help, because that's kind of what Committed is as well. Gilbert and Felipe, her boyfriend (the same one she meets at the end of Eat, Pray, Love), have been happily living in the U.S., surrounded by family and friends, when they discover that they must either marry or Felipe will face deportation. Elizabeth and Felipe are completely committed to one another, but after failed marriages on both sides, are terrified of the idea of legally marrying. So, as they spend the next year abroad, drifting from location to location awaiting the U.S.' approval of their impending marriage (a process which involves a lot of background checks, immigration lawyers, and red tape), Gilbert does what comes naturally: she researches marriage and interviews (okay, interrogates) everyone she can find with different cultural perspectives of marriage, hoping to somehow reconcile herself to what she views as unavoidable, but also completely undesirable. Even though the memoir is technically about Gilbert, it's really about marriage-- its history, its implications, its future, and how it is perceived and experienced in different cultures. I was fascinated by the findings from studies Gilbert shares, the people she encounters and the lessons she learns. I've been married six years, yet could still relate to so many of her fears, and I also learned some valuable lessons that will probably impact the way I view my union. Much of what she wrote was common sense, but it was the type of information where you go, "Oh yeah. I guess I knew that, but I'd kinda forgotten to apply it. Oops." This might be one of those books that I push on all of my unmarried-but-possibly-soon-to-be friends (like, half of my fellow bloggers); there are so many kernels of wisdom and provoking thoughts that impacted the way I think of marriage, and I think this book could benefit anyone entering into marriage.
Some of my favorites (sorry they're long-- Gilbert isn't easy to paraphrase and isn't a one-liner kinda writer):
- After Gilbert asks an old woman in a group of Hmong women when she fell in love with her husbands, and how she "knew it was right," they all burst out laughing at her. Later, Gilbert realizes: "Neither the grandmother nor any other woman in that room was placing her marriage at the center of her emotional biography. In the modern industrialized Western world, where I come from, the person whom you choose to marry is perhaps the single most vivid representation of your own personality . . ." (39). Later, she follows with "My friend the Hmong grandmother had never been taught to expect that her husband's job was to make her abundantly happy. She had never been taught to expect that her task on earth was to become abundantly happy in the first place" (43). Maybe this is a kind of sad notion, but I think it bears considering; if we focus on our expectations for our marriage(those grand plans we've all formulated thanks to media, and the outer appearance of every happy marriage we've seen in real life) rather than what's in front of us, we often end up dissatisfied and bitter. I don't think Gilbert is urging readers to lower our standards, but rather to evaluate the role we expect our spouse to play in our life, and to remove some of the responsibility from his/her shoulders.
- Shirley Glass, a psychologist, has a theory that affairs start when people let a friend of the opposite sex in on a personal marital matter-- thereby creating a "window" where there should be a "wall"; you don't want your spouse to be jealous of this friendship, so you underplay or even hide it, now creating a "wall" where there should be a "window." Soon, "the entire architecture of your marital intimacy has been rearranged. Every old wall is now a giant picture window; every old window is now boarded up like a crack house. You have just established the perfect blueprint for infidelity without even noticing" (109-110). WOW... that makes sense.
- "Whenever I see Felipe fly off the handle in public, it messes around with my cherished personal narrative about what a gentle and tender-hearted guy I have chosen to love, and that, frankly, pisses me off more than anything else. If there is one indignity that I shall never endure gracefully, it is watching people mess around with my most cherished personal narratives about them" (206). LOL. Love that.
- "... my parents weave their own version of the porcupine dance, advancing and retreating on each others' territory, still negotiating, still recalibrating, still working after all these years to find the correct distance between autonomy and cooperation-- seeking a subtle and elusive balance that will somehow keep this strange plot of intimacy growing" (224).
As the title implies, Gilbert does eventually "make peace" with the institution of marriage. And hopefully, with all that she's learned and as far as she's traveled (in multiple ways), this go-around will be filled with as much love, harmony and happiness as one can hope for.
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