Book Review : Committed

I finished this book last night & wanted to do a quick write-up about it before work. Elizabeth Gilbert is quickly becoming one of my favorite writers. Most people are familiar with her best-seller, Eat, Pray, Love which became a movie & sky rocketed Gilbert's fame. Committed is the follow-up to that story. It chronicles the challenges that her & her fiance face when he is denied access into the United States at random one day when they are returning from a trip. What they are faced with is nothing short of a mess. The government decides that in order for Felipe, her fiance, to enter the country again, Gilbert & him must get married. Which is a bit of a problem. If you read Eat, Pray, Love you'll know Gilbert basically does not believe in marriage anymore. So, she sets out, traveling the world (again, but this time with Felipe in tow) & studies marriage from all different points of view, cultures, & societies. What you get is trully a treasure trove of information concerning the past, present, & future of marriage.

I've never thought too much about marriage. I've always known that one day, I want to get married. I know what I want my wedding to be like & more importantly, I know what I want my marriage to look like. I've probably come to these conclusions thanks to my parents & their successful 30-year marriage to one another. I also know what I don't want my marriage to look like. I've seen alot of marriages fall apart whether it be my friends' parents or even close friends of my own who got married at a young age & are now divorcing at a young age. You wonder what went wrong & cross your fingers (hope to die) that you will never make those mistakes in your own future marriage.

Committed challenged all of my beliefs concerning marriage & even monogamous relationships as a whole. By mid-book I was thinking, "Why on earth would anyone ever want to get married with statistics like this?!" The divorce rate is astronomical here in the US, compared to in other countries, & for good reasons. We seem to take marriage pretty lightly here, as a whole and some still seem to have a warped view on what a marriage actually is. However, by the end of the book, I felt even more firm in my beliefs that a successful marriage is something that I want in my life & it seems that my idea of what that marriage will be like seems to be a pretty solid one, which I must thank my parents for, again.

As a whole, I just loved this book. Having fallen in love with her story of traveling the world, finding herself & ultimately falling in love with Felipe in Eat, Pray, Love, I was beyond excited when I found that there was a follow-up to that story. I would definitely recommend this to all types of readers. Don't be fooled, this book is not "chick-lit".

I'll leave you with this...
"The poet Jack Gilbert wrote that marriage is what happens "between the memorable." He said that we often look back on our marriages years later, perhaps after one spouse has died, and all we can recall are "the vacations, and emergencies"--the high points and low points. The rest of it blends into a blurry sort of daily sameness. But it is that very blurred sameness, the poet argues, that comprises marriage. Marriage is those two thousand indistinguishable conversations, chatted over two thousand indistinguishable breakfasts, where intimacy turns like a slow wheel." - Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed