I love memoir, and yes, I did read and enjoy (loved!) Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir which helped stimulate the memoir genre as we know it Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia. In the introduction to Committed, Gilbert herself addresses the difficultly of publishing a follow-up to the kind of blockbuster success that Eat, Pray, Love became. I wasn’t necessarily holding her to that standard, but was hoping for more of the same kind of personal exploration and self-examination that she shared in that book.
Committed is instead written like a project memoir (which I also like). In books such as the hilarious A.J. Jacobs’ The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible or Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project (linked to my review), the author takes the approach that a journalist would — examining his or her own life and supplementing it with intensive research on the subject. Yes Gilbert shares her personal experiences, but mostly explains or reacts to other studies she’s read on marriage — and divorce — or laws, or social commentary on the institution.
Ultimately, she’s not trying to change the world (well, she might be trying to sway thoughts and laws about marriage and what it does to women) — she’s telling her story. She’s telling why she chose love, and why she had chosen to be unmarried and child-free before being forced to take another look at marriage.
If you are looking for information on the institution of marriage — particularly if you feel disenfranchised from it either by divorce, or singleness (by choice or circumstance), or exclusion (by the legal definition of marriage), then I can highly recommend this book to you. As she says in the subtitle “A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage,” she is in fact looking at the institution of marriage from the viewpoint of one who does not believe that marriage has been a good thing — for her personally and also more broadly for women in general.
But for me, a happy-to-be-married woman who is (fairly) socially conservative, it is more of a flatline. I am glad I read it, because I do like Gilbert’s style and matter-of-fact way of looking at life, but I don’t need to read it again, and I’m not sure that it will stick with me as others (such as the ones I mentioned above) have.
Jennifer Donovan would love to be able to travel as widely as Elizabeth Gilbert has. She blogs at Snapshot, where she shares about some of the trips she’s been able to take (but not quite as candidly as the memoirist does).
Dawn says
Interesting take on this, Jennifer. I am interested in this one, as well as E,P,L, which has been on my reading list for so long now.
Cassandra says
I read Eat, Pray, Love so I’ll be reading her newest book. I also read The Year of Living Biblically and loved it!