That’s when I finally tore into Elizabeth Gilbert’s smash 2006 bestseller, right before reading her new memoir -- Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage, a sharp, contemplative follow-up out this month -- and Stern Men, a lovely, surprising novel she published in 2000, when the idea that she might one day be considered a sort of lifestyle guru would have just seemed weird. Gilbert has a seemingly well-deserved reputation for being generous, smart, and supremely likeable. It’s hard to think of another writer who has published a book that so perfectly appeals to female readers, and could earlier have been said to “write like a man.” Gilbert didn’t set out to do this; she’d had some respectable literary success with Pilgrims, her collection of short stories; Stern Men (the novel), and her 2002 biography of Eustace Conway, The Last American Man (as well as, it must be said, a 1997 GQ article that was adapted into the movie Coyote Ugly). Then her marriage fell apart and she fell into an all-consuming, ultimately impossible relationship, and she decided she needed to spend a year eating lots of pasta in Italy, mediating at an ashram in India and chilling out in Indonesia -- and she wrote about the experience, because she’s a writer, and that’s what she does. 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. But upon attempting to return from a trip abroad, Felipe was detained by Homeland Security and then informed that the only way he might be allowed to re-enter the United States was if he and Gilbert were to marry. Effectively “sentenced to wed,” if the couple wanted to continue to live in the U.S. or ever visit it together, marriage was a bullet that needed to be bitten. She didn’t want to be married anymore, she realized: “I was trying so hard not to know this, but the truth kept insisting itself to me.” She had accomplished a great deal, domestically speaking—she had answered the questions of where to live and with whom. Still, while "Eat, Pray, Love" struck a chord by giving "pleasers" permission to please themselves for a change, it's Gilbert's voice that accounted for its phenomenal success.
– Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert's new book, Committed, has our heroine coming to terms with marriage after swearing off the institution, with the aid of a lot of research. Some critics aren't convinced: "One generally doesn’t indulge another person’s emotional processing at this length unless the jabbering is likely to conclude with sex," Ariel Levy writes in the New Yorker. And that's not where the book goes—rather, it ends with "suspicious" "peace and contentment." The author "seems, at times, in her own uncomfortable, self-deprecating way, to be trying for a history or analysis of the institution of marriage," Katie Roiphe writes for DoubleX. "Her new status as bestselling author seems to have endowed her with some responsibility to write about the larger culture, which is the central problem with the book." That old Gilbert is still there, Malena Watrous writes in the San Francisco Chronicle, but "heavily researched chapters like 'Marriage and History' feel more academic, which would be OK except that she is not making a coherent argument about marriage so much as trying to talk herself into it." Yeah, it's not Eat, Pray, Love, rites Eryn Loeb of Bookslut. But it is good. Gilbert is "open about the fuzziness of it all, making Committed one of the wisest and most sensitive explorations of marriage—or really, relationships in general—I’ve read."