Eat, Pray, Love. Then What? Get Married.
Eat, Pray, Love. Then What? Get Married.
A year after completely scrapping a 500-page follow-up to “Eat, Pray, Love,” Elizabeth Gilbert’s mega-best-selling spiritual travelogue, she has delivered a new book that Viking will publish in January.
Titled “Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage,” the book is a memoir of a tumultuous year that came 18 months after “Eat, Pray, Love” leaves off, as well as a meditation on wedlock.
Ms. Gilbert, 40, said the book, which recounts how she came to marry the Brazilian-born Australian lover she met in Indonesia in “Eat, Pray, Love,” was not just a straightforward memoir of what happened and how she felt about it.
In exploring her deep ambivalence about marriage — having vowed never to remarry after the painful divorce that triggered the wanderings chronicled in “Eat, Pray, Love” — she read historical and sociological studies. She also interviewed family members and friends, and talked to people whom she and José Nunes (then her companion, called Felipe in the book), met during 10 months in Southeast Asia. In “Committed” she weaves her reflections on this material into her own experiences.
“It is and isn’t a sequel,” Ms. Gilbert said in a telephone interview from near their home in Frenchtown, N.J. “It’s the same two characters, but it’s a very different setting and emotional backdrop. The second book has more of an academic contemplation and more of my family in it.”
Given the phenomenal paperback success of “Eat, Pray, Love” — it spent 57 weeks at the No. 1 spot on the New York Times paperback nonfiction best-seller list and has remained on the list — the new title will be watched closely by fans and publishing insiders to see if Ms. Gilbert has lasting power.
Viking, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA), which published “Eat, Pray, Love” in 2006, is announcing a first print run for “Committed” of one million copies in hardcover. (Although such numbers are known to be widely exaggerated, they indicate the publisher’s ambitions.) According to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of sales, “Eat, Pray, Love” sold nearly four million copies in paperback.
When Ms. Gilbert signed a two-book deal with Viking for a novel and another work of nonfiction in 2006, “Eat, Pray, Love” had just been published in hardcover to mostly good reviews, but had not yet achieved its remarkable sales record. Ms. Gilbert thought she wanted to write a novel about the Amazon, and had a more amorphous idea for a nonfiction book about creativity.
But in May of that year, Ms. Gilbert said, Mr. Nunes was detained in Dallas as the couple were returning from a trip to France. After hours of questioning, immigration officials told the couple that the simplest way for Mr. Nunes to be allowed back into the country was for them to marry.
With divorce behind them both, neither wanted marriage. But they did want to build a life in the United States. Mr. Nunes had already established a business importing gemstones and jewelry to the United States, and Ms. Gilbert said she wanted to have a home base near her American family. As they waited to clear the bureaucratic hurdles to gain Mr. Nunes’s re-entry into the United States, the couple traveled to Australia, Bali, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. Out of this exile a book idea about marriage was born.
“I spent about 10 months trying to learn as much as I could possibly learn about this very frustrating, contradictory and ultimately interesting human habit,” Ms. Gilbert said. “I was trying to wrap my mind around it or gain enough perspective to feel that I could gain a place within it that didn’t feel coerced.”
The couple finally got permission for Mr. Nunes to re-enter the United States in 2007, and they married that year. Ms. Gilbert started writing a book she tentatively called “Weddings and Evictions.” In late 2007 Viking promoted it in the back of at least 200,000 copies of “Eat, Pray, Love,” describing it as a memoir about Ms. Gilbert’s “unexpected journey into second marriage” and promising publication in 2009.
When she finished a draft in May 2008, she took it to a copy shop to print out a first version. As soon as she began paging through it, she recoiled. “It was different from just the anxiety and insecurities that you feel when you’re writing something,” she said. “It was nondebatable.”
Without showing it to Paul Slovak, Viking’s publisher and Ms. Gilbert’s editor, she wrote asking for a deferral on her deadline. Mr. Slovak, although concerned that the follow-up to the blockbuster not take too long, gave her another year.
Ms. Gilbert said she never could read the first draft in its entirety. She identified the problem as a clash of two voices: one, “an ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ hangover,” — the chatty, witty tone that earned Ms. Gilbert her good reviews and loyal fans — and the other, “more sober and considered and confident and mature.”
After taking six months off, Ms. Gilbert decided she could write again, this time in what she believed was a more authentic voice. “I was scared that all the people who loved ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ might not want to read that new voice,” she said. “But I knew that if I didn’t do it that way it would just be a lousy book.”
Mr. Slovak, who never saw the original draft, said the new book, which runs around 300 pages, had retained the familiar tone of the earlier work. “It’s unmistakably her voice in this new book,” he said.
Ms. Gilbert knows that some knives may be out for her as she embarks on the publicity for the new memoir.
“There’s something very scary about having millions of people waiting to see what you’re going to do next,” she said. “The people who love ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ are very dear and are very encouraging, but they also have their expectations.”
“But the impossibilities of meeting the expectations of millions of people,” she added, “have been well chronicled.”
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'Eat, Pray, Love,' by Elizabeth Gilbert
The Road to Bali
The Road to Bali
Early on in "Eat, Pray, Love," her travelogue of spiritual seeking, the novelist and journalist Elizabeth Gilbert gives a characteristically frank rundown of her traveling skills: tall and blond, she doesn't blend well physically in most places; she's lazy about research and prone to digestive woes. "But my one mighty travel talent is that I can make friends with anybody," she writes. "I can make friends with the dead. . . . If there isn't anyone else around to talk to, I could probably make friends with a four-foot-tall pile of Sheetrock."
This is easy to believe. If a more likable writer than Gilbert is currently in print, I haven't found him or her. And I don't mean this as consolation prize, along the lines of: but she's really, really nice. I mean that Gilbert's prose is fueled by a mix of intelligence, wit and colloquial exuberance that is close to irresistible, and makes the reader only too glad to join the posse of friends and devotees who have the pleasure of listening in. Her previous work of nonfiction, "The Last American Man" (she's also the author of a fine story collection and a novel), was a portrait of a modern-day wilderness expert that became an evocative meditation on the American frontier, and was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2002.
Here, Gilbert's subject is herself. Reeling from a contentious divorce, a volatile rebound romance and a bout of depression, she decided at 34 to spend a year traveling in Italy, India and Indonesia. "I wanted to explore one aspect of myself set against the backdrop of each country, in a place that has traditionally done that one thing very well," she writes. "I wanted to explore the art of pleasure in Italy, the art of devotion in India and, in Indonesia, the art of balancing the two." Her trip was financed by an advance on the book she already planned to write, and "Eat, Pray, Love" is the mixed result.
At its best, the book provides an occasion for Gilbert to unleash her fresh, oddball sensibility on an international stage. She describes Messina, Italy, as "a scary and suspicious Sicilian port town that seems to howl from behind barricaded doors, 'It's not my fault that I'm ugly! I've been earthquaked and carpet-bombed and raped by the Mafia, too!' " Later, she sees a Balinese mother "balancing on her head a three-tiered basket filled with fruit and flowers and a roasted duck — a headgear so magnificent and impressive that Carmen Miranda would have bowed down in humility before it." Gilbert also takes pleasure in poking fun at herself. At an Indian ashram, she winningly narrates the play of her thoughts while she tries to meditate: "I was wondering where I should live once this year of traveling has ended. . . . If I lived somewhere cheaper than New York, maybe I could afford an extra bedroom and then I could have a special meditation room! That'd be nice. I could paint it gold. Or maybe a rich blue. No, gold. No, blue. . . . Finally noticing this train of thought, I was aghast. I thought: . . . How about this, you spastic fool — how about you try to meditate right here, right now, right where you actually are?"
"Eat, Pray, Love" is built on the notion of a woman trying to heal herself from a severe emotional and spiritual crisis; Gilbert suggests more than once that she was at risk for suicide. But where she movingly rendered up the tortured inner life of Eustace Conway, the gigantically flawed subject of "The Last American Man," Gilbert has a harder time when it comes to Gilbert. Often she short shrifts her own emotional state for the sake of keeping the reader entertained: "They come upon me all silent and menacing like Pinkerton detectives," she writes of feeling depressed and lonely in Italy, "and they flank me — Depression on my left, Loneliness on my right. They don't need to show me their badges. I know these guys very well. We've been playing a cat-and-mouse game for years now. . . . Then Loneliness starts interrogating me. . . . He asks why I can't get my act together, and why I'm not at home living in a nice house and raising nice children like any respectable woman my age should be."
But wait a second — Gilbert is a New York journalist who has spent the prior several years traveling the world on assignment. In her chosen milieu, it would be unusual if she were married and raising kids in a house at age 34 — by her own account, she left her husband precisely to avoid those things. I'm willing to believe that Gilbert despaired over having failed at a more conventional life even as she sought out its opposite — complications like these are what make us human. But she doesn't tell that story here, or even acknowledge the paradox. As a result, her crisis remains a shadowy thing, a mere platform for the actions she takes to alleviate it.
What comes through much more strongly is her charisma. On a trip to Indonesia well before her year of travel, she visited a Balinese medicine man who read her palm and proclaimed: "You have more good luck than anyone I've ever met. You will live a long time, have many friends, many experiences. . . . You only have one problem in your life. You worry too much." He then invited her to spend several months in Bali as his protégé. At another point, Gilbert petitions God to move her husband to sign their divorce agreement and gets a nearly instant result; later she devotes a love hymn to her nephew, whose sleep problems, she learns the next week, have abruptly ceased. Putting aside questions of credibility, the problem with these testaments to Gilbert's good luck and personal power is that they undercut any sense of urgency about her future. "Eat, Pray, Love" suffers from a case of low stakes; one reads for the small vicissitudes of Gilbert's journey — her struggle to accept the end of her failed rebound relationship; her ultimately successful efforts to meditate; her campaign to help a Balinese woman and her daughter buy a home — never really doubting that things will come right. But even Gilbert's sassy prose is flattened by the task of describing her approach to the divine, and the midsection of the book, at the ashram, drags.
By the time she reaches Indonesia, Gilbert herself admits that the stated purpose of the visit has already been accomplished. "The task in Indonesia was to search for balance," she writes, "but . . . the balance has somehow naturally come into place." There would seem to be only one thing missing — romance — and she soon finds that with a Brazilian man 18 years her senior who calls her "darling" and says things like, "You can decide to feel how you want to, but I love you and I will always love you." Gilbert acknowledges the "almost ludicrously fairy-tale ending to this story," but reminds us, "I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue."
Rescue from what? The reader has never been sure. Lacking a ballast of gravitas or grit, the book lists into the realm of magical thinking: nothing Gilbert touches seems to turn out wrong; not a single wish goes unfulfilled. What's missing are the textures and confusion and unfinished business of real life, as if Gilbert were pushing these out of sight so as not to come off as dull or equivocal or downbeat. When, after too much lovemaking, she is stricken with a urinary tract infection, she forgoes antibiotics and allows her friend, a Balinese healer, to treat the infection with noxious herbs. "I suffered it down," Gilbert writes. "Well, we all know how the story ends. In less than two hours I was fine, totally healed." The same could be said about "Eat, Pray, Love": we know how the story ends pretty much from the beginning. And while I wouldn't begrudge this massively talented writer a single iota of joy or peace, I found myself more interested, finally, in the awkward, unresolved stuff she must have chosen to leave out.
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FT: Lunch with the FT: Elizabeth Gilbert
By Rose Jacobs
Published: May 30 2008 21:10 | Last updated: June 2 2008 08:56
It’s
hard to meet the bestselling author Elizabeth Gilbert without picturing
her collapsed in tears on the floor of a suburban bathroom. That’s the
image that opens her 2006 book Eat, Pray, Love, and one that
seems to stick in the minds of more than 5m readers, from Oprah fans to
book-clubbers to New York subway users, about a fifth of whom seemed to
be reading the book on their commutes this spring.
I came across the book when a friend pressed it on me, confessing she didn’t buy it herself, too embarrassed to be one of the crowd. Instead, she got her fiancé to pick up a copy. And then she couldn’t put it down.
It’s not an ideal book for a man to buy his betrothed. Once Gilbert peels herself off the bathroom floor, she decides to leave her husband of six years, briefly takes up with a younger lover, and embarks on a year-long, multiple-continent journey to explore sensual pleasure in Italy, spiritual transcendence in India and ways to balance the two in Indonesia. There she meets the man who will become her second husband.
But Gilbert’s murder of a marriage isn’t what makes urban intellectual types like my friend squirm. Rather, it’s her relationship with religion: it is the voice of God that helps raise Gilbert from the bathroom floor; serious prayer leads her to stop taking antidepressants; and in India, learning how to meditate, she enters a higher realm in which “I was both a tiny piece of the universe and exactly the same size as the universe”. Urban intellectuals expect tracts on spirituality to be delivered in world religion courses or by serious, scholarly tomes. Or even, at a stretch, in yoga classes. Not by the gushy heroine of her own real-life chick-lit.
But when we meet at the Bridge Café in Frenchtown, New Jersey, it is clear that Gilbert (number 67 in Time magazine’s 2008 list of most-influential people this year – just below Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, just above the architect Rem Koolhaas) is no calorie-counting Bridget Jones. First off, she wants to order as many doughnuts as the café can offer. “They’re home-made,” she explains, “and amazing. I just love them.” When the girls behind the counter confess there are only two left, Gilbert suggests we supplement those with raspberry strüdel.
She is tall, slim and blonde, with smooth skin and blue eyes that flicker only briefly with shyness – or, later, irritation as the photographer takes his time – and you begin to see why her book is free of the anxiety about beauty that weighs down many memoirs by women. While Gilbert writes about feeling rejected by her lover in New York, she never worries that it’s because she’s not pretty enough. In the section on Italy, five or six lines address feelings of physical inadequacy, but mostly she feels beautiful and eats her way through the country. In Indonesia, when she’s ready to start dating again, she never wonders whether she’ll have trouble attracting a man.
Male readers do react differently to Gilbert. Even before our meeting, three different men had sent me the same internet magazine article arguing that if Eat, Pray, Love had been written by a man, women would find it self-absorbed and sexist: “It’s tempting to conclude that women have serious double standards when it comes to defining acceptable behaviour,” stated the writer (he also said reading the book was like travelling the world with a girlfriend who won’t stop talking about herself). But if women do find the book self-absorbed, they also seem to find it invigorating.
Gilbert is sanguine about critics: “I’m sympathetic to people who don’t like it. Every year there are books that everyone reads, and finally I cave in and I pick it up at the airport, and I’m like, ‘I don’t get why this is so popular, I don’t understand why everyone loves this.’ Not everyone has to like it.”
She’s a regular at the café, or has been since moving to New Jersey in early 2007. While still in Indonesia on the final leg of her EPL odyssey, Gilbert logged on to the internet, found an advertisement for a converted church near Frenchtown and bought it sight-unseen. The mountains of money she’s made through Eat, Pray, Love obviously permit a certain financial confidence. A movie version – starring Julia Roberts and produced by Brad Pitt – is now in production, and it’s not the first time Hollywood has shown interest in her work: her first-person magazine account of life as a New York City bartender became the 2000 film Coyote Ugly.
It’s easier to succeed at something when you’re “not burdened by being multi-talented”, says Gilbert in modest contradiction of the determination to write that has taken her from a childhood spent in a Christmas-tree farm in Connecticut to becoming the author of three acclaimed books – Pilgrims (1997), a collection of short stories ; Stern Men (2000), a novel; and The Last American Man (2002), the biography of a backwoods survivalist. By the time she divorced her husband, she was a feature writer for GQ magazine and the main breadwinner. And when she realised her marriage wasn’t making her happy, she took measured steps to get out of it.
Why, then, does the book’s account of those measured steps make her seem so flaky? “I’m not going to deny I’m flaky,” she says after some thought. “But I think it’s the condition of the times in some ways – to live in an era when you have so many options. You worry that if you’ve chosen one thing you’ve lost the opportunity to do 10 other things. So I think I’m a very representative, 21st-century, educated woman. And if that’s flaky, that’s what we are.”
Flaky is a good description for the raspberry strüdel, so I swap to a chewy doughnut and ask Gilbert about differences in the way British readers have responded to the book. Eat, Pray, Love was first published in the UK in April 2006, and hasn’t had quite the success there that it enjoys in the US. “[In Britain], that kind of rank, emotional self-examination is not done,” she posits. “That said, I doubt very much that there’s much difference between me and what would be my 38-year-old equivalent in London.”
The day before we met, Gilbert typed the last word of the first draft of her next book, which will almost certainly fall into this revelatory road-trip genre: it’s a meditation on marriage, written while travelling through south-east Asia, and tentatively titled Weddings and Evictions.
Gilbert explains: when she and her new husband, José (EPL’s Felipe) – a handsome, older Brazilian – met in Bali, neither had any intention of marrying, having both come out of acrimonious divorces. “It was the most safe, reassuring feeling in the world to be promised you never had to do that again,” Gilbert says. But a few years later, en route to New Jersey, José was stopped by border control at Dallas-Fort Worth airport and told he’d better get married if he planned on staying in the US. The couple had three choices: they could separate, they could move elsewhere, or they could marry, and “the idea of never, ever being with him here was really hard. He loves America.”
They married but it still took 10 months for him to get permission to return to the US. During that time, travelling in Asia with José, Gilbert began to mull on the book that would follow Eat, Pray, Love. “I dove into my first marriage like a labrador into a swimming pool, and my sister pointed out that it might behove me, this time, to think about the history of this thing.” She approached her task with a scholar’s diligence, reading up on the history of marriage. She would wake up her new husband at three in the morning, she says, and say: “‘Did you know that in the 11th century women had more rights after divorce than they did in western Europe in the 1940s?’ And he’d be like, ‘That’s wonderful, that’s wonderful, but it’s three o’clock in the morning.’”
It’s this sort of cute anecdote, complete with predictable punchline, that grates on many of Gilbert’s detractors. A number of readers of Eat, Pray, Love have told me they hated Gilbert’s style – but finished all 350 pages. Gilbert says she’s noticed the too-cute tic herself: she tries to cull standalone lines at the end of long paragraphs, “The punchline or detraction or retraction or sarcastic self-demolition ... Whatever line is lying at the end is probably not as funny as I thought it was. If it’s funny at all.”
This self-censorship seems more evident in her fiction, however, which tends to treat its bright, eager female characters with scepticism and often reads more like Henry James in the American west than anything remotely chick-lit. She may return to fiction, in fact, having hesitated about publishing Weddings and Evictions. Gilbert says she writes each book as a letter: Eat, Pray, Love was a letter to Darcy Steinke, a friend and the author of the memoir Easter Everywhere, who also went through a divorce, suffered depression, and had, says Gilbert, “a spiritual journey of a different shape”. With the new book, Gilbert found herself writing to another friend, Ann Patchett, the Orange-prize-winning author of Bel Canto (2002), who is on her second marriage.
But, to judge by book sales and author events, many of Gilbert’s readers feel she is writing directly to them, helping them cut through confusion of their own marital mires by plumbing the depths of her own. She tells me about a book signing at which a woman approached and asked whether she should leave her husband. “I just said, ‘I know that you understand why I can’t do that. I know that if you think about that for just 10 seconds, you’re going to understand why that’s not possible.’” The woman came to her senses and began to laugh.
By now we have given up on the doughnuts and the photographer asks if he can take some photos of Gilbert talking, but also looking into the distance now and again. “Like you’ve caught me thinking about God?” she jokes, and obliges.
...........................
The Bridge Café
8 Bridge Street
Frenchtown, New Jersey
2x cafe lattés $7.90
1x black coffee $2.25
2x homemade doughnuts $5.00
1x piece of raspberry strüdel $1.50
Total $16.65
‘Eat, Pray, Love’ is published by Bloomsbury (£7.99)
Rose Jacobs is the deputy editor of FT Weekend Magazine
...................................................................
From Wife of Bath to ex-wife of New York
My local Waterstone’s bookshop is flummoxed about where to shelve Eat, Pray, Love. It could, of course, go in “Biography” – it is, the author tells us, a “spiritual memoir”. But that word “spiritual” could just as well relocate it in “Religion”, along with St Augustine’s Confessions. Its subtitle is “One Woman’s Search For Everything”. There’s no shelf for “Everything” but a whole corner of the store for “Women”. All very puzzling, writes John Sutherland.
To cut a long shelving dilemma short, the big W has dumped Gilbert’s book in “travel writing”. Oh, and in “Bestsellers”, of course. It’s currently breaking 5m copies worldwide.
All of these readers (and more – this is a book that women, particularly, love to pass on) won’t need any summary. Gilbert, a smart New York writer, finds herself trapped in what F Scott Fitzgerald called the “crack-up”.
Marriage broken, post-marital relationship screwed, and, to cap it all, 9/11. Prozac is one option (booze was Scott’s). But not this lady’s. Bags are packed. Like Bunyan’s hero, she departs the City of Destruction in search of her personal Celestial City on the hill. And God. And Love. And a number one spot on the NYT bestseller list wouldn’t go amiss.
Call it Pilgrim’s Progress, 21st-century style, or a voyage of self-discovery . In Italy, Gilbert eats herself into bovine serenity – taking in the high culture of the place as dessert. Then on to India, where she un-pampers herself into high spirituality and a respectable waist size, scrubbing ashram floors and almost attaining the “turiya state” – the elusive fourth level of human consciousness. Then on to Bali and she’s ready for love.
The frame of this book is as old as books themselves. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath (five former husbands in her wake) set out for Canterbury with the same aims as our ex-wife of New York.
What gives Eat, Pray, Love its salt and savour (to use Bunyan’s homely phrase) is Gilbert’s shrewd eye, her sharp tongue and her indomitable will, not just to survive but to (Bunyan again) “progress”. And her niceness.
This last point is important because, if one turns it all around, very few Indonesian women on the rebound from a crappy relationship could circumnavigate the globe, first class, to “find” themselves. For most of the world spiritual enlightenment has to begin and end at home. Despite those months on her knees scrubbing the floor, Gilbert is always the privileged tourist. But a very nice one. And, more to the point, a damnably readable one.
Tourism of the Soul (no shelf in the bookshop for that, alas) sells big in the US from time to time. What Eat, Pray, Love inescapably calls to mind is Robert M. Pirsig’s superseller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a book which attained biblical status in the hippy 1970s. One Biker’s Search for Everything. Vroom vroom.
You’ll still find copies of Pirsig’s soul-manual in New Age bookstores. Pilgrim’s Progress, meanwhile, has been in print for nearly four centuries. I don’t think Eat, Pray, Love will be on the shelves for our great-great-great grandchildren. But, like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, it’s still got lots of juice left in the tank.
John Sutherland is emeritus professor of literature at University College, London and the author of ‘Bestsellers: A Very Short Introduction’ (Oxford University Press)
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.
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