Committed to reading something else.

Oh my Lord. It’s here and it’s far from fabulous (if you believe the review in The Times.) But who couldn’t have predicted that?

I’m talking about the new book from author Elizabeth Gilbert: Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage. Just in case you’ve been occupied with living, contemplating or otherwise been caught up in your own life for the past several years, you may not have had the chance to worship at the altar of what MSN called a literary juggernaut, Eat Pray Love. I’ve written all I care to about that book in columns and on this blog, so I’m moving on to the news about her new book, Committed.

Here we go: Seriously? Really? It’s difficult to choose my favorite part of Gilbert’s interview on MSN but I’ll offer these for consideration:

1. “Britney out” - "...you're in battle against yourself. This sort of cannibalistic self-competition ... this is largely why people Britney out." Gilbert uses this term (in earnest) to describe the idea that sometimes success destroys people, especially people who never stop trying to top their latest achievement. I’m not sure if she coined it but it’s annoying and somehow superior-sounding. This is the best one of our best-selling authors could do to voice her distaste for self-destructive behavior? Brilliant.

2. On the possibility of being mother: “I've often thought that if I had been married to somebody who wanted to be a mom, I could have done it. I used to say, "Man, I think I'd be a really good dad. I'll be a great provider. I'm funny; I'll go on trips with them — I'll do all sorts of stuff." But the momming? I'm not made for that. I have a really good mom; I know what she put into it. I didn't think I had the support to both have that and continue on this path that was really important to me.”

Translation: Dads are providers who possess a sense of humor, a love of adventure and other kinds of ‘stuff.’ Moms are…humorless home bodies. How is this train of thought even possible in a woman as cosmopolitan and sophisticated as Gilbert? She’s not in her seventies or eighties; she’s forty years old. We’ve come a long way, baby.

3. On her husband and their partnership: “We've been together five and a half years now, and I have never had that man put a plate of food in front of me where I didn't feel like I was in holy rapture. Because I never, ever, ever saw, in my entire life, a man bring a plate of food to a woman. Because it wasn't his job.”

Note to self: thank my husband for the dinners he prepares much more often that I. I hadn’t realized that made him such an item of curiosity in the 21st century. (He’s exactly the same age as Gilbert’s husband by the way.) Once again, how is she a forty-year old professional woman in the Western world who has never been connected to a man who prepared and served her a plate of food? Is it that freakish?

4. On travel and spontaneity: “When I was in Mexico when I was 20 [note: she previously disclosed that she traveled to Africa when she was nineteen], I remember meeting this American couple who were in their 60s, and they said, "Oh, it's so great that you're traveling now, before you have kids, because you won't be able to then." I know this is a thing that people do; they go traveling for a year, and then they hitch their leash to the wall and put their face in their feed bag and that's the end of it. And I thought, "But I might want to keep doing this," you know?”

“…hitch their leash to the wall and put their face in their feedbag…” I'm sorry. Would that be similar the actions involved in choosing to create a home, putting down some roots, developing some constancy and building a life within a community, surrounded by family (including children you adore) and friends you love?

I kind of can’t really go on with this except to say that much of this is very amusing. During her interview, Gilbert acknowledges that she is comfortable with her persona: “….I'm not what's being said about me, either in the highest praise or the highest criticism. I know I'm not a self-indulgent idiot; I also know I'm not the second coming of Deepak Chopra. [And thank God for that. One is quite enough, thank you.] If I had believed either of those, or both, as some people do when they get famous, that's when the mental illness arrives.”

In other words, she is not an extreme. I get that; few people are. And yet, she has very clear and defined images of others. They are either bread-winners or they are busy “momming.” They are either globetrotting adventurers or they’re hitched to a wall with their faces in feedbags. Mental illness must be on their collective doorsteps.

How very enlightened. How very open-minded. How very entitled. And since I’ll never get back the hours I put into Eat, Pray, Love, I think I’ll pass on Committed.

Are there really people waiting to read this?

** NOTE: I realize I'm writing a blog and therefore probably guilty of exactly what I'm about to discuss here but so be it. I prefer to think of it as being complex, not contradictory. **

I admit I have a completely irrational streak about publishing. I LOVE great writing, both fiction and non-fiction, but I HATE what feels like indulgent, pretentious, entitled, annoying writing and publishing of same. I suppose that has been going on forever but over the past few years, its feels like this whole "listen to me, I've discovered myself and now I want you to discover me, too" genre has taken on a new level of aggravating. It also seems inordinately populated by women who simply must tell their stories to the rest of us.

Make no mistake: I don't loathe first person writing that's clever, surprising, different or engaging. To slice this even thinner, I don't hate memoirs as a class of writing. But I am opposed to memoirs that make the reader [me, in my case] feel like a loser. I guess the difference between an enjoyable first person memoir and a painful one is just that: how the reader feels during and after reading the book. When I read a good one, I find the storyteller interesting, oftentimes admirable, but even if they're less than likable, they're never condescending. When I read one I end up hating as I finish the last page, it usually comes down to the fact that the writer makes me feel like a failure.

Which brings us, almost inevitably, to this. Several years ago I wrote a column that questioned the appeal and popularity of a best-selling memoir titled Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert. Without reiterating the column here, suffice it to say I couldn't figure out the point of the book. It depressed me because I am about seven lifetimes away from being able to escape my life to spend time - in Italy, India and Indonesia - discovering myself. And getting an advance from a publisher to do it and then write about it by the way.

Whatever. Plenty of women seemed to take some joy and comfort and inspiration from Gilbert's memoir about her own personal growth and the lessons she learned about herself as she traveled around the world for one full year. That's super. God bless. Couldn't that be the end of it?

Well, no, it couldn't be. At least not if you think like a publisher. One successful book deserves/requires a sequel (another reason I love Salinger). So Gilbert's upcoming book, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage will give us all a glimpse into the courtship and events that led to Gilbert's seemingly blissful second marriage to the man she feel in love with while they both were living in Bali. The story behind the story is that Gilbert wrote her follow-up to EPL, then couldn't even read through it, because she realized it was all wrong. Now what? Well, like most of us do when faced with a problem that needs a solution, she took six months off, and then decided she could write again.

I don't know about you, but lots of times when I don't know how to solve a problem, I take six months off. To think about things. Six months. Off. To think about what to do next and decide whether or not I can do it.

God help me how can any of us relate to this? Despite my tirade up until this point, I don't begrudge anyone happiness. I wish Elizabeth and her husband nothing but a lifetime of joy and fulfillment in each other's company. But at the rate we're going here, in about 24 months we'll be reading about something as unique and astonishing as Gilbert's pregnancy, followed by a delightful and heart-felt book about her whirlwind experiences as a mother, and if everything plays out beautifully, stories about her amazing grandchildren.

Please, please, please. One of my favorite aphorisms goes something like this: "Never miss the opportunity to shut up." How I wish more people followed that advice.