Book review - Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert

There was so much in this book that I related to strongly, having been through all kinds of relation*shit* in recent times. I found it heartbreaking, comforting and intriguing, all at the same time. Its not for everyone - in fact it has had some quite negative reviews particulartly from Eat Pray Love fans. But I couldn't put it down. I highly recommend it, particularly if you have been through a horrible divorce and you're coming out the other side a stronger calmer and happier person, not despite but because of the experience. What doesn't kill us :)

As in the New Yorker -
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/01/11/100111crbo_books_levy

Keeping things in perspective is not Gilbert’s strong suit. This is why she goes on so many trips and does so much information gathering: she wants to understand how her fellow-humans have resolved the issues that torment her.

So we should not be surprised that when Gilbert found herself on the verge of a second wedding, in a state of dread, she decided “to put a little effort into unraveling the mystery of what in the name of God and human history this befuddling, vexing, contradictory, and yet stubbornly enduring institution of marriage actually is.” She consulted books and scholars. She interviewed Hmong grandmothers in the mountains of Vietnam about their level of marital satisfaction. She went to see her grandmother. The result is Gilbert’s new book, a journey through domestic history and her own neuroses, “Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage”.
Gilbert had not intended to remarry. Both she and her gentleman friend Felipe — a Brazilian gem trader she met in Bali, who provided her with passion and adoration and a tidy romantic ending for “Eat, Pray, Love” — had been “so badly gutted” by their divorces that they “had sworn with all our hearts to never, ever, under any circumstances, marry.” But Felipe is not an American citizen. After one too many trips to the United States to visit Gilbert and to sell his rocks, Felipe was taken away in handcuffs from immigration control at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, and told that he could not return to the U.S. unless he had an American wife. Gilbert, then, is “sentenced to marry,” and she’s none too pleased about it. “I felt mournful and sucker punched and heavy and banished from some fundamental aspect of my being,” she writes. “But most of all I felt caught.”