Committed: A Love Story by Elizabeth Gilbert (English) Paperback Book

Description: Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert Gilberts #1 "New York Times"-bestselling follow-up to "Eat, Pray, Love" is an intimate and erudite celebration of love. Told with the authors trademark humor and intelligence, this fascinating meditation on compatibility and fidelity chronicles Gilberts complex and sometimes frightening journey into a second marriage. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description 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: Creative Living Beyond Fear.At the end of her memoir Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert fell in love with Felipe, a Brazilian living in Indonesia. The couple swore eternal love, but also swore (as skittish divorce survivors) never to marry. However, providence intervened in the form of a U.S. government ultimatum: get married, or Felipe could never enter America again. Told with Gilberts trademark humor and intelligence, this fascinating meditation on compatibility and fidelity chronicles Gilberts complex and sometimes frightening journey into second marriage, and will enthrall the millions of readers who made Eat, Pray, Love a number one bestseller. Author Biography Elizabeth Gilbert is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Big Magic, Eat Pray Love, and The Signature of All Things, as well as several other internationally bestselling books of fiction and nonfiction. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her latest novel, City of Girls, comes out in June, 2019. Discussion Question for Reading Group Guide INTRODUCTION In her bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love , Elizabeth Gilbert met Felipe, a Brazilian gemstone trader, in Indonesia. As she finished her travels (and the book), their magical affair evolved into a deeper love, and the two resolved to settle together back in the United States. Both had been through bad divorces, and though they pledged fidelity to one another, they were content to live in domestic bliss unrecognized by official ceremony or legal title. Unfortunately, the Department of Homeland Security, noting Felipes record of border crossing for business, had other plans for them. When an airport guard held Felipe and threatened deportation, Gilbert asked what legal recourse they would have. The guard suggested a simple solution: marriage. The idea came as a shock to the couple, but recognizing that their options were limited, they agreed to set the process in motion and apply for a visa that would enable Felipe to return to the U.S. In the meantime, they set off on a peripatetic year in Asia, traveling with limited resources and waiting for word from their immigration lawyer as their case languished in bureaucratic uncertainty. Gilbert used this time to research the concept of marriage in Western culture, as seen through the lens of historians, psychologists, sociologists, and poets, looking closely at how the institution has evolved to reflect our social needs and how it is so often intertwined with religion, politics, class, and money. In an attempt to overcome her anxieties about returning to the altar, Gilbert also interviewed natives of Laos and Vietnam, as well as her own family and friends, about their attitudes toward matrimony. All the while she and Felipe deepened their commitment to one another, putting their beachside romance to a stronger test--living out of bags in foreign countries, under the emotional duress of indeterminate exile, for months at a time. A thoughtful examination of marriage and true partnership in contemporary society, Committed is a deeply insightful and relevant book. Illuminating little-known facts such as the partnership rate among seagulls and the mating rituals in the Roman neighborhood of Trastevere, Gilbert explores divorce, compatibility, monogamy, gay marriage, child rearing, and feminism. As in Eat, Pray, Love , her wit, curiosity, and human compassion elevate a personal journey to a compelling and important narrative. Committed delves into one of our strongest cultural institutions as its author finds her own place within it. ABOUT ELIZABETH GILBERT Elizabeth Gilbert is an award-winning writer of both fiction and nonfiction. 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. Her 2002 book, The Last American Man , was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is best known for her 2006 memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, which has been published in more than thirty languages. A CONVERSATION WITH ELIZABETH GILBERT Q. In some sense, the books conclusion--that you would find a way to make peace with marriage--was foregone, considering the circumstances you and Felipe were facing. But what twists and turns surprised you along the way? While its true that this wasnt a book in which I was deciding whether to get married or not (since that decision was made immediately, under duress, as soon as Felipe was detained by Homeland Security at the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport), what I was seeking, instead, was a way to find comfort within that forced circumstance. I was searching for a means of reconciling myself to the whole notion of matrimony, which I imagined would be a difficult task given my instinctive aversion to that hidebound old institution. During all my research and contemplation, though, I gradually discovered that marriage--once you examine it closely--is not necessarily just a hidebound old institution but also a complex, fascinating, flexible, and ever-evolving bundle of social ideas that shift and transform with every new generation. I came away with a curious and unexpected sense of respect for marriage at an almost Darwinian level--amazed that this curious human habit still stubbornly endures, even after all these centuries of change and modification. Q. Your subject matter--the significance and endurance of marriage--is widely relevant to readers yet deeply personal. How did you find a narrative balance that would enlighten and engage readers while allowing room for self-exploration? If theres anything I learned from writing Eat, Pray, Love it is this: I am a very representative twenty-first-century American woman. The questions, fears, and longings that I face in life are not that different from the questions, fears, and longings of thousands of other people just like me. In that regard, I feel comfortable using myself as a stand-in for other peoples questions, allowing the character of "Liz" to become an investigating avatar who vocalizes and explores what everybody else is secretly asking themselves. The main difference between me and everybody else, though, is that because of my position as a writer I actually have the time, the resources, and the energy to spend three years doing absolutely nothing but examining one question from every possible viewpoint and then distilling my conclusions down into something like an extensive term paper that I can then share with others. Of course, nobody wants to read anything that sounds like a term paper, so Ive chosen to weave my own tale--my own love story--through all the research and contemplation in order to keep my readers engaged in something that will feel more immediate and personal. Q. As a sequel of sorts, Committed follows up the fairytale romance of Eat, Pray, Love with some stark realities, including the bureaucratic proceedings of the Department of Homeland Security. Was it difficult, as an author, to switch gears and take on this less romantic subject matter? I like to say that the difference in tone between Eat, Pray, Love and Committed is the difference in tone between romance and marriage. Eat, Pray, Love is, in every way, a romantic story, full of escape and longing and sensual exploration and even the shimmering thrill of emotional imbalance. Such a tone was appropriate to that year of self-exploration because thats what it was like. I was overcome during my Eat, Pray, Love journey by a sense of daring, of soaring possibility, and such expansion was exactly what I needed, in order to reinvigorate my life after a period of loss and sorrow. But I daresay that marriage demands of us a slightly more pragmatic temperament. And the events that precipitated Committed were so especially serious (you could say that Felipes and my romance ended the minute the men in the Homeland Security uniforms handcuffed him and led him away) that a sense of sobriety and levelheaded focus was really called for in this situation, in order to handle things wisely. That same sense of sobriety and focus, I think, informs the overall tone of Committed . It wasnt painful or limiting to write the book in such a manner; it just felt accurate and appropriate to both the subject and the situation. Anything else would have felt like a lark, which would not have benefitted anyone, least of all me. Q. The notion of "tiny acts of household tolerance" is a beautiful and spiritual way of thinking about partnership. In your own life, how does your spirituality intersect with marriage? Everything I have ever learned about life--spiritual and otherwise--helps me to do better within this marriage than I have in past relationships. I think this is part of the reason that marriage is so ill-advised for young people. With rare exception, most twenty-two-year-olds simply havent been sanded down or humbled enough by lifes experiences to have acquired the wisdom and perspective that make long-term human intimacy possible. But yes, certainly the lessons of a sincere spiritual quest have been awfully helpful in negotiating the challenges of running a household--with the most important lesson of all being that I am, at the end of every day, responsible for my own state of being. I doubt that there is a more important tool of cheerful companionship than that truth. Q. Having gone through a painful divorce and remarriage, do you find you actually have more reverence for the institution of marriage? Beyond the particulars of your relationship, how is the experience of marriage different for you now? I once asked a friend of mine, whom Id recently witnessed frolicking happily with her four-year-old daughter, "Do you love being a mom?" My friend replied, "I dont intrinsically love motherhood as a concept, but I do love being Lucys mom." I feel the same way about marriage. Do I love and adore matrimony, as an institution? Not necessarily. But I love and adore Felipe. I believe in him. And even after almost six years together, I simply enjoy the hours that we are able to spend together, and (as the events of Committed show), I will do anything to defend our privacy, our union, our contract. I have a much better husband now, in my second marriage, than the husband I got in my first marriage--but its also worth noting that I am also a far better wife to Felipe than I was to my first husband. Its rather astonishing, as it turns out, what a difference it can make to get married when one is middle-aged, accommodating, and calm, rather than young, self-absorbed, and reckless. Q. The traveling in exile across Southeast Asia you describe in Committed is Excerpt from Book CHAPTER TWO Marriage and Expectation A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her. -- Oscar Wilde A little girl found me that day. Felipe and I had arrived in this particular village after an overnight journey from Hanoi on a loud, dirty, Soviet-era train. I cant rightly remember now why we went to this specific town, but I think some young Danish backpackers had recommended it to us. In any case, after the loud, dirty train journey, there had been a long, loud, dirty bus ride. The bus had finally dropped us off in a staggeringly beautiful place that teetered on the border with China--remote and verdant and wild. We found a hotel and when I stepped out alone to explore the town, to try to shake the stiffness of travel out of my legs, the little girl approached me. She was twelve years old, I would learn later, but tinier than any American twelve-year-old Id ever met. She was exceptionally beautiful. Her skin was dark and healthy, her hair glossy and braided, her compact body all sturdy and confident in a short woolen tunic. Though it was summertime and the days were sultry, her calves were wrapped in brightly colored wool leggings. Her feet tapped restlessly in plastic Chinese sandals. She had been hanging around our hotel for some time--I had spotted her when we were checking in--and now, when I stepped out of the place alone, she approached me full-on. "Whats your name?" she asked. "Im Liz. Whats your name?" "Im Mai," she said, "and I can write it down for you so you can learn how to spell it properly." "You certainly speak good English," I complimented her. She shrugged. "Of course. I practice often with tourists. Also, I speak Vietnamese, Chinese, and some Japanese." "What?" I joked. "No French?" "Un peu," she replied with a sly glance. Then she demanded, "Where are you from, Liz?" "Im from America," I said. Then, trying to be funny, since obviously she was from right there, I asked, "And where are you from, Mai?" She immediately saw my funny and raised it. "I am from my mothers belly," she replied, instantly causing me to fall in love with her. Indeed, Mai was from Vietnam, but I realized later she would never have called herself Vietnamese. She was Hmong--a member of a small, proud, isolated ethnic minority (what anthropologists call "an original people") who inhabit the highest mountain peaks of Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, and China. Kurdish-like, the Hmong have never really belonged to any of the countries in which they live. They remain some of the worlds most spectacularly independent people--nomads, storytellers, warriors, natural-born anticonformists, and a terrible bane to any nation that has ever tried to control them. To understand the unlikelihood of the Hmongs continued existence on this planet you have to imagine what it would be like if, for instance, the Mohawk were still living in upstate New York exactly as they had for centuries, dressing in traditional clothing, speaking their own language, and absolutely refusing to assimilate. Stumbling on a Hmong village like this one, then, in the early years of the twenty-first century is an anachronistic wonder. Their culture provides a vanishingly rare window into an older version of the human experience. All of which is to say, if you want to know what your family was like four thousand years ago, they were probably something like the Hmong. "Hey, Mai," I said. "Would you like to be my translator today?" "Why?" she asked. The Hmong are a famously direct people, so I laid it out directly: "I need to talk to some of the women in your village about their marriages." "Why?" she demanded again. "Because Im getting married soon, and I would like some advice." "Youre too old to be getting married," Mai observed, kindly. "Well, my boyfriend is old, too," I replied. "Hes fifty-five years old." She looked at me closely, let out a low whistle, and said, "Well. Lucky him." Im not sure why Mai decided to help me that day. Curiosity? Boredom? The hope that I would pass her some cash? (Which, of course, I did.) But regardless of her motive, she did agree. Soon enough, after a steep march over a nearby hillside, we arrived at Mais stone house, which was tiny, soot-darkened, lit only by a few small windows, and nestled in one of the prettiest river valleys you could ever imagine. Mai led me inside and introduced me around to a group of women, all of them weaving, cooking, or cleaning. Of all the women, it was Mais grandmother whom I found most immediately intriguing. She was the laughingest, happiest, four-foot-tall toothless granny Id ever seen in my life. Whats more, she thought me hilarious. Every single thing about me seemed to crack her up beyond measure. She put a tall Hmong hat on my head, pointed at me, and laughed. She stuck a tiny Hmong baby into my arms, pointed at me, and laughed. She draped me in a gorgeous Hmong textile, pointed at me, and laughed. I had no problem with any of this, by the way. I had long ago learned that when you are the giant, alien visitor to a remote and foreign culture it is sort of your job to become an object of ridicule. Its the least you can do, really, as a polite guest. Soon more women--neighbors and relations--poured into the house. They also showed me their weavings, stuck their hats on my head, crammed my arms full of their babies, pointed at me, and laughed. As Mai explained, her whole family--almost a dozen of them in total--lived in this one-room home. Everyone slept on the floor together. The kitchen was on one side and the wood stove for winter was on the other side. Rice and corn were stored in a loft above the kitchen, while pigs, chickens, and water buffalo were kept close by at all times. There was only one private space in the whole house and it wasnt much bigger than a broom closet. This, as I learned later in my reading, was where the newest bride and groom in any family were allowed to sleep alone together for the first few months of their marriage in order to get their sexual explorations out of the way in private. After that initial experience of privacy, though, the young couple joins the rest of the family again, sleeping with everyone else on the floor for the rest of their lives. "Did I tell you that my father is dead?" Mai asked as she was showing me around. "Im sorry to hear that," I said. "When did it happen?" "Four years ago." "How did he die, Mai?" "He died," she said coolly, and that settled it. Her father had died of death. The way people used to die, I suppose, before we knew very much about why or how. "When he died, we ate the water buffalo at his funeral." At this memory, her face flashed a complicated array of emotions: sadness at the loss of her father, pleasure at the remembrance of how good the water buffalo had tasted. "Is your mother lonely?" Mai shrugged. It was hard to imagine loneliness here. Just as it was impossible to imagine where in this crowded domestic arrangement you might find the happier twin sister of loneliness: privacy . Mai and her mother lived in constant closeness with so many people. I was struck--not for the first time in my years of travel--by how isolating contemporary American society can seem by comparison. Where I come from, we have shriveled down the notion of what constitutes "a family unit" to such a tiny scale that it would probably be unrecognizable as a family to anybody in one of these big, loose, enveloping Hmong clans. You almost need an electron microscope to study the modern Western family these days. What youve got are two, possibly three, or maybe sometimes four people rattling around together in a giant space, each person with her own private physical and psychological domain, each person spending large amounts of the day completely separated from the others. I dont want to suggest here that everything about the shrunken modern family unit is necessarily bad. Certainly womens lives and womens health improve whenever they reduce the number of babies they have, which is a resounding strike against the lure of bustling clan culture. Also, sociologists have long known that incidences of incest and child molestation increase whenever so many relatives of different ages live together in such close proximity. In a crowd so big, it can become diffi cult to keep track of or defend individuals--not to mention individuality. But surely something has been lost, as well, in our modern and intensely private, closed-off homes. Watching the Hmong women interact with each other, I got to wondering whether the evolution of the ever smaller and ever more nuclear Western family has put a particular strain on modern marriages. In Hmong society, for instance, men and women dont spend all that much time together. Yes, you have a spouse. Yes, you have sex with that spouse. Yes, your fortunes are tied together. Yes, there might very well be love. But aside from that, mens and womens lives are quite firmly separated into the divided realms of their gender-specific tasks. Men work and socialize with other men; women work and socialize with other women. Case in point: there was not a single man to be found anywhere that day around Mais house. Whatever the men were off doing (farming, drinking, talking, gambling) they were doing it somewhere else, alone together, separated from the universe of the women. If you are a Hmong woman, then, you dont necessarily expect your husband to be your best friend, your most intimate confidant, your emotional advisor, your intellectual equal, your comfort in times of sorrow. Hmong women, instead, get a lot of that emotional nourishment and support from Details ISBN0143118706 Author Elizabeth Gilbert Short Title COMMITTED Language English ISBN-10 0143118706 ISBN-13 9780143118701 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY 306.81 Audience Age 17-17 Residence New York City, NY, US Birth 1969 Year 2011 Publication Date 2011-02-01 Subtitle A Love Story Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2011-02-01 NZ Release Date 2011-02-01 US Release Date 2011-02-01 UK Release Date 2011-02-01 Pages 320 Publisher Penguin Putnam Inc Imprint Riverhead Books,U.S. Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:35876832;

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