Eat, Pray, Love. Then What?

Author Elizabeth Gilbert, Gilbert with journey mates, and Julia Roberts as Gilbert.

Mr. Dorje Andersson (WQ Book Reviewer)

Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love is a remarkable feel-good read -- particularly for females. Every woman around the office lavished attention on any other female holding a copy. They could not get enough, praise enough, nor (it seemed) envy one another enough. I thought, it's not for me. It's obviously not for any man. But eventually, I browsed through it. I saw her talk about it. (See short video below).

And as with all great spiritual literature, I was drawn in. There is much for a man to be put off by but far more that intrigues. Ms. Gilbert's description of meditation is spot on. Her explanation of the attendant phenomena as kundalini awakens on her trip to India is compact and fascinating. I venture to guess that her guru is a man, yet for the best she leaves her unnamed.

Starting off as a gastronomic journey in Italy, searching for love and fulfillment -- or anything to fill the void after a divorce -- she travels as she goes along a momentous internal journey so many thoughtful people embark on. It is the Heroine's (and Hero's) Journey Siddhartha Gautama is famous for successfully completing. This is a remarkable read, and readers are quickly rewarded with much to learn from this author. And now there's a follow up:

Eat, Pray, Love. Then What? Get [re-]Married.
Motoko Rich (NY Times, Aug. 20, 2009)

A year after completely scrapping a 500-page follow-up to “Eat, Pray, Love,” Elizabeth Gilbert 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. More>>

Elizabeth Gilbert Takes On Marriage
Catherine Strawn (Aug. 21, 2009)
Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, was published in 2006, and her followup book was touted in the back of at least 200,000 copies of the book.

Tentatively titled Weddings and Evictions, it was described as a memoir about Gilbert’s “unexpected journey into second marriage” and was supposed to hit shelves in 2009. But Gilbert scrapped her 500-page draft of the book and told her publisher she needed more time. What she had wasn’t working.

Because Eat, Pray, Love had been such a huge success, staying in the top spot on the New York Times bestseller list for 57 weeks, Viking wanted the followup to come out as quickly as possible. But her editor gave her another year, and this second draft, now called Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage will be published in January.

The delay wasn’t such a bad idea, in my opinion, since “Eat, Pray, Love,” the movie version starring Julia Roberts, Billy Crudup, and Javier Bardem, is currently filming in New York City, and Gilbert is back on everyone’s minds. More>>