Our latest book review is Elizabeth Gilbert's -- she of Eat, Pray, Love fame -- newest. Committed was handed to me by the same friend who gave me Ms. Gilbert's first memoir, just a few years ago but before it had reached the masses and Julia Roberts.
A quick backstory: I sat down for lunch with one of my closest friends, Ariel, who happens to be an avid reader with impeccable taste in everything from art to friends to shoes to literature. I soak up every single thing she says and does. One key difference in the way she and I approach books and movies and the like is this: once the opening credits have rolled, or the first page has turned, I'm in. I can't stop reading or watching once it's started, which means I've wasted many an afternoon on a less-than-interesting or well-made creation. Ariel has no such patience. If it doesn't grab her, she's on to the next thing that might. So, when she began reading this little book that all sorts of women-type folk were reading and saying things like, "Oh, everyone will see themselves in this book" or "Oh, it's like she was talking just to me" or "Oh, It's as if she was writing about my life," Ariel looked at me and said, "I don't feel like she's writing about my life. I feel like she's writing about yours." So she stopped reading, handed it over, and I lost myself in a fantastic true story about a woman who loses herself a little in a marriage she's rethinking, then loses herself a lot as she turns away from it, and then somehow manages to find herself again. I relived some nights crying on the bathroom floor, spent some new nights crying on a different bathroom floor, and finally felt good to have gotten some stale tears out of my system. Nowadays it's garnered so much attention that it's probably hard at this point for Eat, Pray, Love to live up to the hype, but if you've not read it I really encourage you to give it a try. It's truly touching.
Which leads us to a similar lunch, just a few weeks ago, where Ariel handed me the next of Liz's books. Without giving much away from either story, Eat, Pray, Love ended somewhat happily with our author finding love again, with a man as equally determined never to remarry as she was. Ah, romance and skepticism, such strange and amicable bedfellows. Committed picks up shortly thereafter, when the U.S. Department of Homeland Security puts in their two cents and tells the lovebirds -- one of whom happens to not be an American citizen -- that they will, in fact, need to marry. At least if they ever want to spend time together in this great country of ours again, that is. So, Committed tells the tale of a couple "sentenced to marry" and how the author comes to terms with an institution that she feels has really, really let her down. Or perhaps... vice versa.
Ariel couldn't get into the book because it felt a bit "textbooky" to her, and she's absolutely right. Liz Gilbert is, in the case of these two particular books anyway, a journalist. She's telling a very true, factual story. And in this book, she is literally trying to research a good chunk of Western Civilization for its thoughts, ideas, and input on marriage, as she tries desperately to convince herself that the very thing that nearly destroyed her the first time won't, in fact, finish her off this go-round.
I know how she feels, in a way that Ariel and her close-to-perfect husband Lew (I can say that because he's not my husband) will (I sure hope) never know. When a marriage doesn't work, and when you man up and take a good share of ownership in that failure, it cuts you in places and ways that seem unhealable. To know that you've caused pain, pain like a death, to someone whom you love(d) above all others at one point... it takes out your soul for a little while. Melodramatic, I know, but not overstated. And being told over and over and over again that you're in good, epidemically wide-spread company is hardly comforting. People telling you, after the fact and ad nauseum, that the could have seen it coming because you two were too young, or his mother was too involved, or just that hardly anyone makes it in marriage so why did you really expect to, only makes you want to hit them. Even if it’s your own grandmother. Especially then. There is, I'm afraid, no solvent for those wounds. You just have to wait for the scar, and try not to pick the scab while you wait.
I have found myself, for most of the nine or so years I've been divorced (a shocking revelation to all you readers who estimated my age at approximately twenty, I'm sure) telling myself I'll never get married again. There's a lot of self-preservation there, and a lot of pride on the line, because honestly who wants to get their heart shattered twice, or fuck something up beyond all hope of repair twice? But that's for me and my shrink, should I ever have the money or the insurance to procure a shrink. This case, this book, is about the lovely Ms. Gilbert being told by her government that, no matter how adamantly she argues, she's got to either get married or kiss her honey goodbye. I don't think even a note from her shrink would've been able to help. So (and here's where the "textbooky" part comes in) she decides to take their imposed exile as a time to study up on why most marriages fail, how some marriages eek through, and how, every so often, we get stopped in our tracks by the romance of two old people who can't imagine a day without their soulmate.
She studies a great number of cultures, asks a lot of interesting questions, and between you and me still doesn't seem all that convinced at the end of the last chapter that this is for sure going to work. I'm glad no one told me a few years ago that I had to do it again. Yes, it's clinical, in that it's full of facts and history and study. But it's also really touching in that it's full of one woman's willingness to open her own life --fears, hesitancies, doubts and all -- up to the rest of us, and be vulnerable on our behalf. If you're married, I think this'll make you feel really good about it. If your not, I think this'll make you feel really good about it.
And my favorite part? She dedicates the book -- a book about marriage; about singular, exclusionary partnership to (in this case) one man -- to the twenty seven women in her life who have helped her define what being a woman means, above being a daughter, or a sister, or a friend, or a wife. And it seems that they must be a pretty smart group of women, because it seems that they've helped her do just that. Define herself. I know some women like that.
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