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Elizabeth Gilbert – COMMITTED : A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
Elizabeth Gilbert – COMMITTED : A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
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COMMITTED : A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

Elizabeth Gilbert
LIKE NEW, PAPERBACK

RM20.00

A Memoir Of Follow-Up-Book “To Eat, Pray, Love”

Remarks Free Cover-Pages Wrapping
ISBN 9780670021680
Book Condition LIKE NEW
Format PAPERBACK
Publisher CLEARWAY LOGISTICS KNV
Publication Date 14 Jul 2016
Pages 286
Weight 0.48 kg
Dimension 23 × 15.3 × 2 cm
Availability: 1 in stock

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★★ The #1 New York Times bestselling follow-up to Eat Pray Love—an intimate and erudite celebration of love from the author of Big Magic and City of Girls. ★★
 
It’s impossible to talk about Elizabeth Gilbert’s new memoir without first talking about her previous one, “Eat, Pray, Love” — not because “Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage” is in any literal sense a sequel but because the success of “Eat, Pray, Love” drags on the new book like a lead ball and chain.
 
At the end of her bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert fell in love with Felipe, a Brazilian-born man of Australian citizenship who’d been living in Indonesia when they met. The author of ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ takes a thorough look at one of life’s most sought-after social constructs: marriage.
 
No one is more aware of that than Gilbert herself. She opens this book with a note to the reader, essentially addressing the difficulty of having to follow up the hugely popular story of a spiritual journey to heal a broken heart that has been translated into 30 languages and is being made into a feature film starring Julia Roberts.


Resettling in America, the couple swore eternal fidelity to each other, but also swore to never, ever, under any circumstances get legally married. (Both were survivors of previous bad divorces. Enough said.) But providence intervened one day in the form of the United States government, which-after unexpectedly detaining Felipe at an American border crossing-gave the couple a choice: they could either get married, or Felipe would never be allowed to enter the country again.
 
Having been effectively sentenced to wed, Gilbert tackled her fears of marriage by delving into this topic completely, trying with all her might to discover through historical research, interviews, and much personal reflection what this stubbornly enduring old institution actually is.
 
Told with Gilbert’s trademark wit, intelligence and compassion, Committed attempts to “turn on all the lights” when it comes to matrimony, frankly examining questions of compatibility, infatuation, fidelity, family tradition, social expectations, divorce risks and humbling responsibilities.
 
Gilbert’s memoir is ultimately a clear-eyed celebration of love with all the complexity and consequence that real love, in the real world, actually entails.
 
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 hardcover’s 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.
 
The setup for “Committed” is that two marriage-shy people are forced to put aside their fears of tying the knot if they want to stay together. Felipe, the Brazilian-born gem seller Gilbert meets at the end of “Eat, Pray, Love,” has settled with her into a comfortable relationship and resettled in America.
 
That is, until Homeland Security intervenes with the news that Felipe’s too-frequent visits stateside are no longer allowed. If they want to have a life together on American soil, they have to be husband and wife. Gilbert knows that while she enjoys travel, she doesn’t want to restart life as an expatriate, and since both of them are veterans of divorce and heartache, voilà! We have the substantial conflict that kicks the story into motion.
 
While the two float around parts of Asia waiting for months for Felipe’s paperwork to be processed and approved, Gilbert contemplates the condition of Western marriage, its history, its inherent problems, its economic and sociologic implications, and finally its considerations for the individual. You already know from the subtitle that she makes peace with it, so it’s no spoiler to say that in the end the two trade vows. Add in colorful anecdotes about her experiences with locals in the various countries she and Felipe visit, and that’s pretty much it.
 
Along the way, Gilbert neatly and engagingly condenses the high points on a complex array of research on the topic of marriage. While at times her insights into it all appear a bit rote, her story makes breezily accessible much interesting, compelling research that otherwise requires committing to fascinating but denser reading, like Harvard historian Nancy Cott’s “Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation” or anthropologist Helen Fisher’s “Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray.”
 
Gilbert — who, before her mega hit, was a well-respected, guy’s gal kind of journalist known for penning terrific features in such mags as GQ and Rolling Stone — seems to have reverted to a comfortable journalistic distance in this book. The problem is that this is a first-person account and the subject is love, and her life. She tells readers that she loves Felipe, but nowhere does she show a truly unique, poignant moment.
 
She talks of her anguish about marriage, but it is never proved in the actions between them. Gilbert is far too skilled not to be entertaining, but forgive a reader thirsting for more emotion. Marriage is a mystery, the saying goes, and so it remains.
 
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Review From Huffpost :
 
Bless her heart, Elizabeth Gilbert had to fill her own literary shoes after the success of Eat, Pray, Love, and I can’t blame her for her trepidation. While Committed is no Eat, Pray, Love, it’s delightful in its own way. Marriage, as I’m sure you know, is frightening for a lot of folks. The statistics are overwhelmingly dismal; the politics of marriage are worse.
 
That’s why it struck me as horrid when the United States Department of Homeland Security insisted that if Gilbert wanted to be with her Felipe, they had no choice but to get married in order to handle the issue of his ability to come and go from the United States.
 
Why is the Department of Homeland Security weighing in on the marriage issue? Regardless, it sent Gilbert into a right tizzy, and well it might. Nothing like having orange alerts about marriage anyway, but then to tell you that the love of your life is illegal and the only way to fix it is to tie the knot!
 
So, Gilbert, intrepid soul-explorer that she is, began to ask questions about marriage. The first, and most powerful place that she starts is with the admission that she has no idea what marriage is. “I don’t know” are the three most powerful words in English, dear one.
 
Like all A students, Gilbert begins to read about marriage — what it is, what it isn’t, its history, how it’s changed. Then she starts to interview women during her travels with Felipe whilst awaiting something, anything, from the Department of Homeland Security.
 
She interviews women in Vietnam, her own family, and friends. Everyone has their own opinion — naturally — and they all differ. In turn, Gilbert is terrified — terrified that “love and marriage don’t go together like a horse and carriage, but instead love and divorce go together like a carriage and a horse.”
 
Gilbert and Felipe are traveling through Southeast Asia, using their two highly differing styles of travel, when Gilbert falls into a mad chase through marital statistics that had me laughing out loud. Statistics do not make a marriage. Marriages are made via daily choices: choices for kindness, gentleness, truth, honor and forgiveness.
 
Finally Gilbert figures out what her major trouble is. She’s a Greek (not a Hebrew). “Our legal code is mostly Greek; our moral code is mostly Hebrew. We have no way of thinking about independence and intellect and the sanctity of the individual that is not Greek.
 
We have no way of thinking about righteousness and God’s will that is not Hebrew. Our sense of fairness is Greek; our sense of justice is Hebrew.” Most of us in the West fall on the Greek side as well.
 
She addresses our ideas of love as a hopeless combination of both, and then gets to the bottom line about marriage. People invented marriage. “To somehow suggest that society invented marriage, and then forced human beings to bond with each other, is perhaps absurd. It’s like suggesting that society invented dentists, and then forced people to grow teeth.” Nope, “couples invented marriage.”
 
Long, sweet story, a little shorter: They buy a house sight unseen in New Jersey. The U. S. government finally gets it together. Gilbert and Felipe get married, and they lived exactly the way they want to, in their own marriage, which is what we all end up doing anyway.
 
I thoroughly enjoyed Gilbert’s writing and musing. Read Committed — it’ll make you think about marriage, if you’re curious, or about your own marriage, if you’re stuck.
 
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About the Author
Elizabeth Gilbert is an award-winning writer of both fiction and non-fiction. Her short story collection Pilgrims was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award, and her novel Stern Men was a New York Times notable book. In 2002, she published The Last American Man, which was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critic’s Circle Award. She is best known for her 2006 memoir Eat, Pray, Love, which was published in more than thirty languages.
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