Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert

I picked up two more books at the library yesterday: Freedom by Jonathan Franzen and Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert (the follow-up of sorts to Eat, Pray, Love). I read Committed in one sitting last night. I really enjoy Gilbert’s writing style. It reminds me of Carrie Bradshaw’s voice from Sex and the City…Carrie is a favorite character of mine. Committed tells the story of how Gilbert makes peace with a necessary second marriage to Felipe (the man she meets in Bali toward the end of Eat, Pray, Love) while taking an interesting look at the history and theory behind the institution of marriage itself. Liz and Felipe have no desire to marry again, although they have committed a lasting fidelity to one another; however, the US Department of Homeland Security has other plans for this happy couple. Here are some of the more interesting thoughts that I came across in the book:

·        People of our generation value our freedom of choice; however, “all these choices and all these longings can create a weird kind of haunting in our lives-as though ghosts of all our other, unchosen, possibilities linger forever in a shadow world around, continuously asking, Are you certain this is what you really wanted?” The consequences born from our freedom of choice are something from which we are never free…how ironic, right?

·        One of Gilbert’s single friends shares this: “Wanting to get married, for me, is all about a desire to feel chosen … that I am precious enough to have been selected by somebody forever.” This is really what relationships, of any kind, are all about…validation of personal worthiness.

·        And my favorite quote from Gilbert: “This is intimacy: the trading of stories in the dark. This act, the act of quiet nighttime talking, illustrates for me more than anything else the curious alchemy of companionship.” I love this because it speaks to how intimacy is not necessarily about sex, but about any of the private moments that any two given people chose to share…to how two people build their own private story that will never belong to any other two people.

Well, enough rambling I suppose…on to reading the Franzen…J