In 2006, journalist Elizabeth Gilbert published her mega-best-selling memoir “Eat, Pray, Love,” on the aftermath of her brutal divorce in which she traveled to Italy, India and Indonesia trying to put her life back together. She met Felipe, an older Brazilian-Australian, and the two fell madly in love, intending to stay together but never to marry.
The same year that Gilbert published “Eat, Pray, Love,” the love- happy couple was stopped while returning to the United States through the Dallas-Fort Worth airport. A Department of Homeland Security officer interrogated Felipe on his suspicious passport, which recorded too many American visits on a tourist visa. The sympathetic officer told the devastated couple that Felipe would be banned from the United States forever unless Gilbert and he marry. Felipe was then deported to Australia.
The meaty incident provided Gilbert with the impetus for her new book, “Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage.” While waiting for his immigration papers to be sorted out so they could wed, the two spent 10 months of forced exile in Asia, traveling through Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia. As the rough travel took a toll on their relationship, the two discussed the meaning of their impending marriage, which neither wanted.
“I don’t know a more efficient way to work through something than to write about it,” said the 40-year-old Gilbert in a telephone interview from her home, a converted church in Frenchtown, N.J. “It really makes you parboil your opinions. I could have gone to therapy, but that is only once a week, which is much less intense than a book. I really wanted to learn everything I could about this perplexing institution of marriage.”
With her publishers boasting of a print run of 1 million copies in hardback, “Committed” has hit most best-seller lists. The new book is a beautiful one, with Gilbert exploring the romantic, legal and financial history of marriage in America and other countries, and how she overcame her own fears of getting remarried. She calls “Committed” her “song of self-persuasion” to take the plunge again.
Unlike the brutally honest self-examination Gilbert put herself through in “Eat, Pray, Love,” the writer holds some things back in the new book.
“In ‘Eat, Pray, Love,’ there wasn’t much of a line,” said the gregarious and charming Gilbert. “It was a raw moment in my life, and I was writing a book that I only expected a few dozen people to read. Since then, I’ve shored up my boundaries a bit more. ‘Committed’ is not the bleeding, honest account that you saw in ‘Eat, Pray, Love.’ There are a lot of things that I left out of this book. I see ‘Committed’ as more a meditation than a memoir.”
Then fame swept in
The couple’s stay in Asia came right before the explosion of “Eat, Pray, Love” in paperback, which made Gilbert a household name. While they waited for the American government security vetting that would prove that Felipe was not a terrorist and Gilbert was not importing him into the United States for immoral purposes, the two bickered and examined their love. They also indulged in some hysterical self-disclosure: Gilbert is prone to being overcontrolling and Felipe is paranoid and may drink too much.
“There is nothing in the new book that I would mind people knowing about my life,” Gilbert said. “Nobody who knows me is going to say, ‘Really? She’s overcontrolling?’ To me, the troubling and emotionally traumatic part of the book was trying to shake off my phobia of the whole topic of marriage. I wanted to find a place where I would not feel coerced and not be grieving at my wedding.”
Despite their profound declaration of love and commitment, Gilbert and Felipe spent months shaping a prenuptial agreement, which Gilbert explained was emotional insurance.
“I do have certain boundaries!” insisted an amused Gilbert in response to the question why she doesn’t reveal what the prenup says in the book. “The prenup was something we were both interested in. In our divorces from our first spouses, we had both the shock of a complete lack of recognition when you are faced with what your spouse believes they are entitled to.
“‘You want what for how long?’ There was something sickening about that. Drawing up a prenup was almost a way of reassuring each other if this relationship ends, you are not going to be left devastated by who I am and who I turned out to be.”
In addition to the psychic bruises from her first marriage, Gilbert still pays her ex-husband alimony.
According to Gilbert, Felipe took the media frenzy over “Eat, Pray, Love” in stride and is quite blase over what promises to be another national Gilbert festival over “Committed.”
“Because he’s not American, Felipe does not define his success or failure on how many times he’s been on television,” Gilbert said. “There is nothing in him that wants to be part of the ‘Committed’ media juggernaut.
“For what it is worth, his name has been changed,” she said. “It gives him a teeny bit of privacy. He’s never been interviewed. People want to interview him, but he’s not going to do anything. He won’t be going on ‘Oprah’ and won’t be in People.”
Gilbert said firmly that there will be no “Eat, Pray, Love III.” “Felipe loves the new book and he’s proud of it, but we’ve both agreed that there will be no more books where he is a character,” she said.
Before she became one of America’s foremost unintentional gurus on love, Gilbert was a journalist working for prominent national magazines.
After two memoirs, Gilbert is ready to pick up other nonfiction work.
“I had huge questions that I wanted to answer,” she said. “Now I am in a more stable place in my life. I am also really excited to go back to writing about other things besides me.”
Dylan Foley is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.
