Quotes
Praise for Committed
“As a tour guide to both Asia and matrimony, Gilbert is consistently entertaining and illuminating and often funny. . . . Fans of Eat Pray Love will be quite content.” —Curtis Sittenfeld, The New York Times Book Review
“Retains plenty of Gilbert’s comic ruefulness and wide-eyed wonder . . . In some ways, her new book comes from a similar place as Eat Pray Love. In both, Gilbert travels around the world, first to come to terms with a devastating divorce, next to come to terms with the prospect of marrying again.”— Newsweek
“Gilbert is most affecting in Committed when she is contemplating the marriages of the women in her own family. . . . Ultimately, Gilbert is clear about what she, like most people, wants: everything. We want intimacy and autonomy, security and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, coziness and thrills. But we can’t have it. Gilbert understands this.” — The New Yorker
“One of the wisest and most sensitive explorations of marriage—or really, relationships in general—I’ve read . . . intensely thoughtful and personal. . . . Gilbert comes off as a writer skilled with both words and feelings, unwilling to be boxed in.” — Bookslut.com
“I have a fantasy—that every person in this country, before he or she weds, would take a class in marriage and pass with at least a B+. The text? Elizabeth Gilbert’s [Committed]. . . . In the end, Committed is, among other things, an attempt to help readers not make the mistake Gilbert did: namely, marrying too young and too unenlightened.” —Elle
“Gilbert’s genius is in flipping an old literary script—she’s not addressing us as her dear readers, but instead acting as our dear writer, an ideal friend, smart but not intimidating, wise but not smarmy, kind but imperfect, funny in a way that makes us feel better about ourselves.” —The Boston Globe
“An intelligent history of marriage, summarizing its paradoxes . . . Life must lead the way with courageous spokeswomen like Gilbert—candid, modern in expression of her ‘needs’ and her enjoyment of perfect freedom.” —The New York Review of Books
“A sensitive and adult look at the history of marriage in the West . . . It may also attract a new following to Gilbert’s work, one that appreciates its gratifyingly broadened and more mature focus.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“A charming narrative that ends, Shakespearean fashion, with a happy-hearted wedding. What’s not to like?” —The Washington Post
“Inspiring . . . A deeply compassionate, painstakingly researched, and often laugh-out-loud funny treatise on marriage . . . You’ll find everyone in this book from Goethe to Oscar Wilde, but it’s Gilbert’s powerful voice you will remember most. With this book, she gracefully, brilliantly transitions from personal memoirist into social historian.” —The Dallas Morning News
“Smart but unpretentious, funny, warm, and generous. . . By the end of one of [Gilbert's] books, you feel as if she is your friend, too. It’s a pleasure to be back in that friend’s company again.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“Entertaining . . . Gilbert’s humorous, self-deprecating voice—so effective in Eat Pray Love—presides in Committed too.” —The Miami Herald
“Gilbert has given the antiquated institution a thorough once-over, and the clear-eyed primer is a must-read for any modern woman contemplating a trip down the aisle.” — Marie Claire
“Committed retains Gilbert’s winning voice and also benefits from an apparently hard-won new level of realism. . . . Her frustrating, tense, uncertain, and circuitous journey in Committed reads like a heightened version of the second stage of love, when the euphoria has faded, daily habits begin to cloy, and lovers become irritable. Bubbling to the surface time and time again in this all too human story is a rich brew of newfound insight and wisdom and a priceless sense of humor.”—NPR
“An incredibly thorough, introspective, and ultimately engaging examination into one of life’s most permeating, sought-after social constructs. And this fact alone makes it a book that begs to be read.”—The Christian Science Monitor
“Carefully and often winningly argued . . . What [Gilbert] does is turn the subject of marriage inside out and on its head.”—The Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Gilbert tries to banish her fears by embarking on a crash course in the history, practice, and meaning of marriage. Her far-roaming inquiry, much of it focused on the paradoxes in women’s lives, is presumptuous and trite one moment and incisive and funny the next. Ultimately, she tells an irresistibly romantic tale spiked with unusual and resonant insights into love and marriage.”— Booklist
