Eat, Pray, Love. Then What? Get Married.

Elizabeth Gilbert’s new book, “Committed,” is scheduled for release in January.

By MOTOKO RICH Published New York Times: August 19, 2009

A year after completely scrapping a 500-page follow-up to “Eat, Pray, Love,” Elizabeth Gilbert’s mega-best-selling spiritual travelogue, she 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.
In exploring her deep ambivalence about marriage — having vowed never to remarry after the painful divorce that triggered the wanderings chronicled in “Eat, Pray, Love” — she read historical and sociological studies. She also interviewed family members and friends, and talked to people whom she and José Nunes (then her companion, called Felipe in the book), met during 10 months in Southeast Asia. In “Committed” she weaves her reflections on this material into her own experiences.

“It is and isn’t a sequel,” Ms. Gilbert said in a telephone interview from near their home in Frenchtown, N.J. “It’s the same two characters, but it’s a very different setting and emotional backdrop. The second book has more of an academic contemplation and more of my family in it.”
Given the phenomenal paperback success of “Eat, Pray, Love” — it spent 57 weeks at the No. 1 spot on the New York Times paperback nonfiction best-seller list and has remained on the list — the new title will be watched closely by fans and publishing insiders to see if Ms. Gilbert has lasting power.

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