Elizabeth Gilbert's Loopy, Unnecessary, and Thoroughly Enjoyable Committed

I got Elizabeth Gilbert's Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage in the mail last week and finished it in two evenings. As a writer whose memoirs are bestsellers -- her last, most popular one Eat, Pray, Love was featured on Oprah, spawned a kind of cult of wandering women, and is about to be made into a movie starring Julia Roberts -- she comes in for her fair share of criticism from literary folk. Consider this comment, from Ariel Levy, in her review of Committed for The New Yorker:

One generally doesn’t indulge another person’s emotional processing at this length unless the jabbering is likely to conclude with sex.

Or this one, about Eat, Pray, Love from the hilarious Lizzie Skurnick:

Nothing is more boring than your epiphanies. (Even worse, sojourners–the more particular they are to you, the more they sound exactly like everyone else’s.) Such is the problem with Elizabeth Gilbert’s journey through the particulars of her digestive, spiritual and moral humors–located, for your corporeal information, in the regions of Italy, India and Indonesia, respectively. It’s a bit of a punt to say the book is self-aggrandizing–how could a book focused on one’s spiritual well-being not be?–but it’s the grand the Richard Bachian strokes that provoke the reader beyond speech: "Simply put, I got pulled through the wormhole of the Absolute, and in that rush I suddenly understood the workings of the universe completely." (Simply put.)

Love that. "Simply put." And I have to agree -- Gilbert's stuff is certainly a bit loopy. Thing is, though, her writing is thoroughly engaging. It radiates warmth and good humour, like her face. And she has a very good sense of humour, too. As a woman who considers herself to have both a certain loopiness and a sense of humour (I can't lay claim to the warm nature), Gilbert is exactly the kind of woman I'd like to have as a friend. I find her work eminently readable, even if equally flawed and of value in pretty much the ways Jessa Crispin outlines in her piece In Defense of Elizabeth Gilbert:

But what's good about Committed is what's good about Eat, Pray, Love. While Eat, Pray, Love is the result of a very painful process, Committed is a clear-eyed examination of the negotiation of a relationship and the struggle to create a supportive partnership after coming out of a traumatic one. Sure, both books kind of fall apart, they are not stylistically daring, and Committed is kind of boring and just rehashes a lot of Stephanie Coontz's vastly superior Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage. It's value lies in that it's about how we get married despite all the bad news, and how, if we go into it really knowing what we're up against, we can create new types of marriages. Marriages where one partner is not unconsciously lifted at the expense of the other.

I am downloading Stephanie Coontz's history of marriage to my kindle as soon as I can get away with it. (As a sidenote, my kindle may cause me to go bankrupt. It is dangerous. I'm like a crack addict whose dealer sleeps on a mat beside my bed.) Gilbert is upfront about how much she borrows from Coontz and, if Coontz is as readable as Gilbert says she is, I'll be giving Sylvie a copy as soon as she hits puberty. If not, I'll give her my copy of Committed. (I've also got my eye on Ben Yagoda's Memoir: A History, given that I seem to have developed an addiction to the genre. And come this summer, I'll also be downloading Displaced, the new memoir by Gilbert's ex-husband, Michael Cooper. Even though Gilbert hardly mentions her first husband in either book -- and when she does, seems very respectful -- it must have been somewhat... trying to have the failure of your marriage lead directly to the kind of outrageous personal success for your ex that Eat, Pray, Love did for Gilbert.)

Comments

[babelbabe]

I am not sure I can handle reading HIS memoir, though.