'Committed' quest
With her new book, Elizabeth Gilbert explores marriage and finds unexpected results
By Carl Kozlowski 01/28/2010
Elizabeth Gilbert is someone who has taken the adage “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade” to heart. First, she turned the pain of a heartbreaking divorce into the impetus for an exotic trip to Italy, where she ate mountains of pasta, and India and Indonesia, where she tried to tackle her emotional and spiritual issues. Then she unexpectedly fell in love with Felipe, a Brazilian-born Australian citizen living in Indonesia.
All three of those experiences fueled her 2006 memoir, “Eat, Pray, Love,” which overcame a lukewarm reception in hardcover to become a worldwide sensation in its paperback release. Translated into more than 30 languages, the tome wound up selling 6 million copies and counting, becoming an Oprah-endorsed sensation and an upcoming movie in which Gilbert is portrayed by none other than Julia Roberts.
All would seem to be a fairy tale, except for the fact the US wouldn't allow Felipe to live permanently with her in America unless they married. Both had been burned in prior marriages and had sworn to avoid its legalities forever, but government ultimatums in the end prevailed and Gilbert took the plunge again. The marriage, and the ten months of bureaucratic hassles leading up to it, inspired her to explore the subject of marriage across the centuries as well as across a myriad of global cultures — a quest that spawned her newest book, “Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage.”
Gilbert will be appearing at All Saints Church at 7 p.m. Friday in a discussion and signing event promoted by Vroman’s Bookstore. She spoke recently by phone with PW about her amazing journey and her thoughts on the state of marriage in the modern age.
PW: “Committed” is more than a memoir, in that it explores marriage in a sociological way. Was it harder to write this book due to the research and statistics involved, or was “Eat, Pray, Love” harder due to its rawer emotions?
Gilbert: “Committed” turned into more of a memoir than I thought it would be. I had pictured it would be a strict treatise on marriage, an academic/journalistic investigation. But of course the story doesn’t have any context unless there’s a reason why this matters. Our story was interesting in that we were being subjected to a shotgun wedding, with the INS holding the shotgun. Especially after “Eat, Pray, Love,” where people enjoyed us as characters, I felt it was needed to put us in the new one after all.
“Eat, Pray, Love” was harder to live because of everything leading up to it, but it just came from a deep gut place. It was going to be hard to write any book after “Eat” because of the phenomenal response people had to that. I would have to overcome that particular hurdle with anything I wrote.
What’s it like seeing the story of your life go from an extended sad period to wild success and the world's biggest female movie star playing you on the big screen?
The thing about the movie is that it’s so long ago, this book [“Eat”] outgrew me. About a year after it came out, it grew slowly. Then almost overnight — when it came out in paperback — it became like a giant event. I let it go with its own life, and it has become something that belongs to the world and is part of other people’s consciousness. I didn’t need it anymore, so I let it slide, so by the time the movie came about I didn’t feel as much ownership of the story because so many hands had been on it.
I knew you had to be willing to truly let it go for whatever financial amount they’re offering. It was easier to do that with “Eat, Pray, Love” than it was for anything else or ever will be because I’d walked away from it — or it had gotten its own driver’s license and driven away from me. The movie doesn’t feel any more surreal to me than anything else. The surreal thing was going from writing for just dozens of readers my entire life to this whole new expectant audience. So it seems natural to me — Julia Roberts? What else would happen after all this? (Laughs)
The next big battleground for marriage is in the drive for same-sex marriages. What are your opinions on that issue?
I feel gay marriage is a historical inevitability in America because every time an outsider group fights for the right to marriage, eventually the group gets it, even with a lot of broken hearts along the way. The fact we’re having this conversation is proof that it’s coming. Marriage is on the decline partly because people can’t figure out its relevance, and it always reinvents itself. People are avoiding and dodging it like a neighborhood no one wants to live in anymore, and the gay people are coming in to revive it and reinvigorate it where straights will follow.
I find it interesting that there’s government departments designed to encourage marriage as a way to help society, but yet we stop others from doing it. It’s like herding chickens — “you straight people get married, you gays don’t!” It’s so convoluted that we’ll have to straighten it out.
Even though you were forced to get married for legal reasons, you seem to have adjusted your views somewhat. Can you take us through that?
I definitely have a more nuanced view of marriage than before. I have a great deal of respect for it — but that’s a loaded word so I have to be careful. The respect I have for marriage is that I’m a bit awed that this sanctioning of human partnership has lasted for thousands of years, that it has evolved century to century and society to society and reinvents itself.
Marriage as it existed in past times — now not even the most conservative commentators would accept a 14th-century version of it. It would have been vanquished if it didn’t adapt to culture and times. That makes it more interesting to me, because it’s a social science experiment that we’re all part of. The reason we have marriage at all is that people are stubbornly creating intimacy with each other — you can’t have intimacy without privacy and you can't have privacy without rights that the government protects. I was in an airport and had my sweetheart taken away because I didn’t have the rights I would have had as a married woman.
Is there any particular country or society that you feel handles marriage the best?
Interestingly, Scandinavia gets it best — marriage is on the decline there, but families are more stable there than any place else in the Western modernized world. A child born in Sweden today to unmarried parents has a much better chance of living his whole life with the same two people than a child born in America to married parents. We fetishize marriage as the best thing, but there they actually have government support for the family — health care, day care — so they seem to be dong something right there. If the point of marriage is to help families stay together, they’re doing it better than we are.
The battle of the sexes is all around us. So what have you learned about how men versus women best deal with marriage?
The statistical evidence is kind of staggering about how married people perform in this culture. It’s still the case that men who are married do far better in life than unmarried ones — they live longer, wealthier and happier, are less likely to die a violent death and have a better quality of life.
Women who are married don’t perform as well as single women — they don’t earn as much, they die younger, have more health problems, weigh 10 pounds more and have more depression and alcoholism. When a woman waits to get married, delays having children, completes herself and then finds a companion, rather than the fantasy of a young woman finding a man to solve everything, it works much better. The statistics of the divorce rate for those under 25 are horrible. The answer seems to be wait and make a good decision.
I think the other thing is men often get dragged kicking and screaming into marriage with low expectations and learn that all my needs are being met, and women enter with soaring expectations and find they don’t get much out of it.
Elizabeth Gilbert discusses and signs “Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage” at 7 p.m. Friday at All Saints Church, 132 N. Euclid Ave., Pasadena. Attendance is free but requires purchase of the book for $26.95 at Vroman’s Bookstores. Call (626) 449-5320 or visit vromans.com.
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Had the good fortune to sit in on Liz Gilbert's guest appearance on The Bonnie Hunt Show yesterday (airs Monday @ 3pm in LA, or so they tell me). She has a wonderful way with a phrase, that woman, and she speaks in a manner that is as accessible as her writing, without pandering to the lowest common denominator - a unique pleasure these days. To experience a touch of Liz's awakening, you may want to check out the Eat Pray Love Bali tour that's being offered this May (http://www.spiritquesttours.com/bali) so that you too can meet Ketut, Wayan, and some of the other characters from Eat Pray Love. As to whether you'll find their own Felipe, well, Liz did a lot of work to get to that point - I think it's an internal journey more than the external one that allowed her to grow enough to do so - she said on the show yesterday that she came to love herself enough to commit to marriage, and I think that's the key. Attraversiamo!