Like Elizabeth’s Gilbert’s previous memoir, the bestseller Eat, Pray, Love, Committed also begins in crisis. In EPL, she is leaving her first marriage—and ends on a happy note when she falls in love with Felipe, an older divorcee living in Brazil. In Committed, due to a problem with Customs, Felipe can no longer travel in and out of the U.S. unless he has an American wife.
As she contemplates a second marriage with great ambivalence, Gilbert turns to research to sort out the mystery of this “befuddling, vexing, contradictory, and yet stubbornly enduring institution.” Gilbert’s wide-ranging examination of marriage turns up a number of interesting historical facts and sociological insights. But she also tells some moving stories of her own and from her own family’s history. Like Gilbert seems to be herself, Committed is both intellectually curious and from the heart.
