Committed

Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage by Elizabeth Gilbert

I am one of the millions of people who enjoyed Eat, Pray, Love so I was anxious to read Gilbert's follow-up about her relationship with the man she met in Indonesia. It's quite intriguing in the beginning. Felipe is essentially deported (though Gilbert points out Homeland Security didn't use that word) because of heightened security restrictions. Elizabeth and Felipe had decided they would not get married because each had experienced such heartache with their first marriages and subsequent divorces. Faced with this forced separation and with Felipe simply not allowed in the U.S., they have to decide if their negative views on marriage outweigh their love and desire to be together every day in the same house in the same country. And what follows is a long and boring diatribe with a bit of research (but not much) on the history of marriage and Gilbert's own feelings on the matter. It made me wonder why she didn't just make this book she clearly needs to write--"I hate my ex-husband and this is why." Pieces of that relationship come up here and there, but it's only rage that I see, not reasons on why the relationship failed. In Eat, Pray, Love she was a likable heroine. In Committed, she's a narcissistic curmudgeon.