Committed: book review

You’ll remember Elizabeth Gilbert as the one who wrote the runaway success, Eat, Pray, Love. The title of her next book, Committed, could have followed those three, immortalized words.

Like it or not, you’ve probably heard of Eat, Pray, Love. It was the success of that book that made the author sceptical of any further great publishing success. Because that’s the type of person she is. A sceptic. The tag line after the title, Comitted – A sceptic makes peace with marriage, says as much.

I ventured into Committed with trepidation. I’m not a fan of angst-filled navel gazing and while I enjoyed Eat, Pray, Love on the whole, had had my fill of analysis of the whole love, marriage thing.

When Gilbert and her Brazilian lover (the man she met and stuck with at the end of Eat, Pray, Love, named in this book Felipe to protect his identity, though I’m not sure why), arrived yet again at a US airport from outside that country, Felipe was detained on the grounds that he was not a US citizen and had been entering and leaving the country too often for the American government’s liking.

If he wanted to be welcome back there again, he would have to become a citizen – easiest route would be to marry Gilbert, and so the decision is rather dispassionately made. They will get married and continue to live together in America, but only after Felipe is deported and Gilbert joins him on an extended exile while they wait for his documentation to ‘come through’.

Gilbert agonizes so well

It is during this exile that Gilbert writes and agonizes over the decision they have made. She is not, as we all know, a big fan of marriage, having famously fled her first one after a breakdown on the bathroom floor. Marriage and kids – not for her. (Thinking of it, the term, Committed, is the same term as would be used if you were, say, sent to jail…)

She does, however, have to make peace with it, as, ironically, it is this very institution that will save her relationship with Felipe and enable them to live ‘normally’ as a couple in the same house, in the same American city.

So she does the research that she's clearly so good at doing: speaks to a variety of people from a variety of cultures, and through their input, crafts a viewpoint of her own.

Surprisingly captivating

Surprisingly, I read this one to the last page. Her recounting of her findings on the topic is done in a casual, non-academic way, and she brings to the table some real pearls on the way society makes and breaks rules to suit those in power at the time – be they religious or political leaders.

Marriage was not always required to be endorsed by the religious or civic leaders in our communities, she says, and certainly was never intended as a way of displaying undying love. No, in fact, it was a far more practical way of joining clans, but for more of that, you’ll have to read the book.

The end, of course, has her marrying Felipe in a special little ceremony in their quirky church of a house in America. Would love to know how the actual marriage is going though.

Buy your copy of committed on kalahari.net here.

Author info: Cindy Moritz

Cindy Moritz is All4Women's contributing editor based in Cape Town. She spent ten years in magazine publishing, and was editor of fashion business title Pursuit for most of that time. She went on to edit popular parenting title Cape Town's Child, drawing on her own experience as mother of two young children. Deciding to practise what she preached, after a couple of years Cindy gave up the office job to pursue that fine balance of work and life which freelancing offers, and after having features published in a number of local magazines including Elle, Longevity, Femina and Strictly Business, she discovered www.all4women.co.za and online publishing. She's never looked back.