by Kate O'Leary

Created on: May 11, 2010

Elizabeth Gilbert is best known for her international bestseller Eat, Pray and Love.  This story committed starts off right where Eat, Pray and Love ends.  Melissa has found her happy ending.  The one she has been looking for for life a man from Brazil, Felipe.  He is all she has ever hoped for and she is in a  place where she can appreciate and admire his qualities while not smothering her own.  Their lives are moving along beautifully.  He comes to the states for ninety day visits and in between he sees his children who live in Australia and runs his business in Brazil and the United States.  Life is going well.  They have achieved a peace and a daily routine that is close to pure bliss and then it all falls apart.

Returning from a trip Felipe is stopped at the United States Border and told by Homeland Security that he is not being allowed back into the country.  It has been determined that he is a risk as he has traveled too often between the United States and other countries.  You learn in the book that he is put in handcuffs and brought into a room with a homeland security guard and questioned for hours.  Throughout the process Elizabeth sits and waits for word and when it finally comes it is not what she is expecting.  Felipe will not be let back into the United States unless he and Elizabeth get married to both of them a sentence not a time for celebration.  However the two of them decide that if the only way they can be together is to suck it up and get married and so begins a ten month journey around the world waiting for Felipe's United States Visa to come through.

This all happens before Elizabeth hit the big time with her bestseller Eat, Pray and Love.  So the two of them one in her late thirties and the others in his early fifties travel like teenagers.  Staying in hotels and hostels that cost eighteen dollars a night and taking transportation that would be outlawed in the United States.  During the course of their travels Elizabeth embarks on the meaning of marriage and it's history.  The book is full of little delightful tidbits of marriage.  How for so many years the Catholic Church encouraged all men and women to stay celibate in order to remain pure for the second coming.  Along with a look at how marriage in non-developed countries is much more of a social contract between families and neighbors and that it is not just limited to two people who may or may not produce children.  That in many ways marriage is an act of defiance and one that takes leaps of faith especially when one is armed with knowledge.

I read Gilberts first big bestseller Eat, Pray and Love and I know I was in the majority of those who did not love it.  I found Eat, Pray and Love to be very self indulgent. Committed goes where she has not gone before and that is outside of herself and by going outside of herself while staying true to herself she wins the ultimate prize.  A man worthy of her talent and her gifts and one who sees all of her.

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