Confession time. I don't do self-help books. Never. People in the books I read read them, people I know read them, heck, I even know of people who write them. But I've always turned up my nose and looked supercilious when a friend raved about the book that saved her life, or that must-read tome that would change the way I looked at the world. I was quite happy with my life and my POV of the world, thank you, I thought. Besides, all self-help books were about men, marriages or management, and what could a writer teach me about them that life couldn't?
Plenty, it seems to me, after reading Elizabeth Gilbert's Committed . While admittedly dancing around the fringes of the man-marriage-management formula, Gilbert brings to her follow-up to the best-selling Eat, Pray, Love the kind of common sense and insight about human relationships your mum would have been proud to pass on to you. What's more, she leavens the history with humour of the self-deprecatory kind, the research with the readability quotient of a thriller. She comes across as intelligent, kind and very much the sort of woman you'd like to have as a best friend when you're doubting the institution of marriage.
Obvious gap
Now, given my reading history, I'm no expert, but for a practice as ancient as marriage, there seems to be suspiciously little related literature that's neither a sex manual nor a crisis-solver. This is the gap Gilbert looks to fill, investigating basic questions like the changing expectations we have of the institution, the way it balances power between the male and female, the threats it faces, its place in history — all with an eye to the Big Question: At a time when, at least in Westernised societies, men and women stand shoulder-to-shoulder on economic and emotional independence, and children are no longer an excuse for holy wedlock, is marriage relevant at all?
Like the best books, Committed takes its fundamental cues from what the author knows best — in this case, her own life. A bad divorce had led to a tour of Asia that spawned Eat, Pray, Love , which ended with Gilbert meeting a Brazilian we know as Felipe and trusting again in love. The two, both scarred by previous relationships, resolve to never marry — and could have lived happily ever after, had not post-9/11 paranoia intervened. Felipe, U.S. officials declare, is making too many visits to America for a non-resident, and the only way they can continue to live together on American soil, it turns out, is if they marry.
While the U.S. State Department verifies their papers, Gilbert and Felipe decamp to South-East Asia, where the author conducts most of her research. Apart from touching on the Hmong tribe of Laos — and claiming, in what seems to be a one-off miscall, that May 3 is National Broken Hearts Day in India — she sticks wisely to the Western interpretation of marriage, studying the concept through prisms as varied as that of Plato and Quaker teacher Parker Palmer. The conclusion (marriage as subversion? really?) may seem more convincing to others than it does to me, but there's no doubt that the fluent — if borderline cutesy — writing makes accessible a civilisation's changing attitudes towards matrimony.
In a recent interview to Open magazine, Bloomsbury editor-in-chief Alexandra Pringle said that Eat, Pray, Love sold better in India than internationally. Pundits may ponder why, but the love-affirming, yet deeply sensible Committed has convinced at least this sceptic to make peace with personal growth tomes.
Committed: A Sceptic Makes Peace with Marriage,Elizabeth Gilbert, Bloomsbury, p.285, £12.99.
