Hays once wrote that "few activities, I've found, are less fruitful than dialoguing with feminist scholars," and her general disdain for (straw) feminists is on display in her coverage of Gilbert. Of Gilbert's upcoming book, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage, Hays writes, "It seems that Ms. Gilbert, a woman capable of roaming the globe with no male protection (beyond an ample publisher's advance), a heroine who had vowed [...] never to wed again, was - wed." But how will her readers react to this new "twist in the Gilbert voyage of feminist selfhood?" Hays asks, "will they be plotting revenge on the supposedly strong, single woman who betrayed them?" The basic thesis of the rest of the piece is: yeah, they will, but how silly of them, because they all just want to get married too.

Hays writes that "Ms. Gilbert was always going to get a guy" and that "such women rarely remain single - even if they profess to be feminists." It's not clear who "such women" are, though Hays quotes several passages in which Gilbert talks to her friends about men and sex. So maybe the type of feminist who "gets a guy" is the kind who, um, wants to? Except, according to Hays, that's all feminists: Gilbert's fans, she says, "are, in the way that feminists always seem to be but hate to admit, boy crazy and sex crazy."

Hays winds up her essay thus:

Ms. Gilbert knows, according to the Times, "that some knives may be out for her." She senses that loyal readers may well feel that their heroine has deserted them for a man. But women have been doing this to their girlfriends since time immemorial. Sisterhood is powerful, but not that powerful.

All of this actually kind of difficult to pick apart, but what Hays to be saying is that feminists equate strength with singlehood, and view anyone who couples up as a traitor. But all feminists really want a man (lesbians don't exist in the Hays universe), and would cheerfully abandon their feminist values should they find one. Of course, this is based on an outdated and wrongheaded notion of feminist values. Only a very few people still demand that feminists eschew men, and most feminists I know accept the notion that whether or not a woman is in a relationship doesn't determine how "strong" she is. It's true that the idea of taking a husband for "male protection" raises my feminist hackles, but the fact that Gilbert didn't need such protection while traveling the world makes me more sanguine about her marriage, not less. She seems to have gotten married because she wanted to, and because she was in love, and "such women" seem pretty happy to me.

It's actually kind of strange that Hays chose Gilbert as her vehicle for insulting sex-crazed, hypocritical feminists. Eat, Pray, Love isn't really a "voyage of feminist selfhood," it's a voyage of plain-old-selfhood — meaning that it feels self-absorbed at times, but also that it's not too useful as a political football. Gilbert doesn't leave her marriage because she's a strong woman who doesn't need a man — she leaves because she's miserable. And she doesn't stay celibate until she meets her lover Felipe because she thinks men are oppressors and sex is evil — rather, she fully acknowledges having been "boy crazy" her whole life, and decides she needs some time alone after her divorce to figure things out. That's not even feminist, that's just smart.

I wasn't a fan of Eat, Pray, Love, and I certainly don't feel betrayed by Gilbert's latest effort — mostly because I don't think Gilbert made me, or feminism, any promises in the first place. But even if she had, even if Eat, Pray, Love were subtitled A Feminist's Feminist Voyage of Self-Reliance and Feminism, she could still have gotten married without renouncing all she stood for. Because sisterhood is, in fact, powerful — so powerful that it can withstand even (shudder) marriage.

A Feminist Icon Gets Her Man [Wall Street Journal]

Subtitled A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage, Committed tells the story of what happened when Gilbert and lover Jose Nunes — called Felipe in Eat, Pray, Love — tried to enter the United state after their courtship in Bali. They were both divorced, and neither wanted to marry again, but they were told marriage was the easiest way for Nunes to gain legal residency. The book's press release says,

Having been effectively sentenced to wed, Gilbert and Felipe spent the next ten months wandering haphazardly across Southeast Asia waiting for the U.S. government to permit them to return.

During this time, she tackled her fears of marriage by studying it intensely, trying with all her might to discover through historical research, interviews, and personal reflection what this stubbornly enduring old institution actually is. Committed tells the story of one woman's efforts to make peace with marriage before she enters its estate once more.

We've criticized Gilbert plenty of times, and some of the "knives out" for the new book may be ours. I should say that every time I write about Gilbert, several commenters rise to her defense, and it's clear that Eat, Pray, Love has inspired many people. As many problems as I had with it, I did find it calming, especially since Gilbert argues that lasting happiness is available to anyone, even those who have suffered personal setbacks and depression. But Gilbert also undercuts her own claim, probably unconsciously, by presenting herself as a supremely special and lucky person. In a Times review, Jennifer Egan puts her finger smack on my least favorite part of the book:

[M]y one mighty travel talent is that I can make friends with anybody. I can make friends with the dead. . . . If there isn't anyone else around to talk to, I could probably make friends with a four-foot-tall pile of Sheetrock.

This half-modest admission — "everybody loves me," she seems to be saying, "but it's just a trait, a talent like any other" — has always rubbed me the wrong way. Partly it's just because I can be kind of shy and awkward, and "making friends with anybody" is certainly not one of my talents. But partly it's because, as Egan points out, Gilbert's charm and "personal power" make it seem like a foregone conclusion that everything will go well for her. Her difficult divorce notwithstanding, the world seems full of people who are eager to help her, and it's no surprise that she finds fun in Italy, enlightenment in India, and the perfect man (Nunes) in Indonesia. Gilbert once said, "I had an easier life than [my sister] did because I had an easier personality and it was easier for people to be sweet to me," and Eat, Pray, Love made me feel like Gilbert's life was easy because it was "easy for people to be sweet to her." What was I supposed to learn from that?

But life in Committed may not be as simple. Gilbert tells Rich that she had to scrap an entire 500 page draft because of "a clash of two voices" — the "chatty, witty" one of Eat, Pray, Love, and one that was "more sober and considered and confident and mature." The finished book may well reflect more of the latter voice, especially given what Gilbert has said elsewhere about her marriage. In a Big Think interview, Gilbert said,

You know, Eat, Pray, Love ends on a very romantic note because it ends within the first two months of a very romantic relationship, right? And so, for me, now, I'm 5 years into that relationship so it's always sort of funny to me when people come up and they're… and they still have… just finish the book and they still have this very starry-eyed idea like, oh lovely, you found this very romantic relationship, you know. And that very romantic relationship has now evolved into a marriage, you know, which, like, everybody else's marriage, is complex.

She also said,

[O]ne thing that's been really interesting to me about doing all this research about marriage is just realizing how the expectations that we have burdened in this institution with, at this point in history, are staggeringly huge. [...] Back in the 1920s, there was a survey that asked college women what they wanted in a partner and they listed all these virtues, you know, reliability, honesty, decency, morality, you know. And somewhere down around 6 or 7 on the list came love and passion. These things showed up sort of low on the list. Prudence was sort up high, you know. And then, in the 1970s, they ask those questions again to women and, you know, the very first thing on the list is, like, love, you know, love and connection and intimacy and then, you know, the other stuff they weren't really paying very much attention to. And now, it's even worse ‘cause they ask this question and they say they want a man who will inspire them everyday. [...] I would never sit down with a young woman and say to her, lower your expectations as a piece of advice for life. [...] But that's a good piece of information to know. Because we shouldn't walk around, thinking that this is how people have always thought about marriage or that this is what people have always expected out of their marriages.

Gilbert certainly isn't the first to say that contemporary people have extraordinarily high expectations of marriage. But to her credit, she doesn't present this as an easy solution to relationship problems, or claim that women should lower their standards. And she clearly doesn't think of her relationship as perfect — she seems to be acknowledging that what she once called an "almost ludicrously fairy-tale ending" has evolved into something more, well, real. So it's reasonable to expect that Committed won't be a self-satisfied brag-fest on how marriage is easy because everybody loves her, but rather a meditation on a complex institution that has burned her in the past. I'll sheath my knife, for now.

Eat, Pray, Love. Then What? Get Married. [NYT]
Elizabeth Gilbert's Follow-Up To 'Eat, Pray, Love' Coming In January 2010 [LA Times]
Elizabeth Gilbert Shares Her Thoughts On Modern Love [Big Think]
The Road To Bali [NYT]

Earlier: Eat, Pray, Love Author Talks To Guardian, Engages Gag Reflex

Gilbert's mother was a nurse at Planned Parenthood in the '70s, and Gilbert says she spoke these words to girls considering abortion:

Please do me this great service and please do me this great favor and please do yourself this great favor. And try to remember, 10 years from now, when you're second guessing this decision that you made, that you made the very best decision that you could make on this day with the information that you had today. As the years go by, you'll have more information and you might wish that you had done things differently. But just don't forget that on the day that you had to make the choice you didn't know and you only knew what you have now. Don't abuse yourself later for what you didn't know now.

It's sensitive advice for anyone considering terminating a pregnancy, but it also applies to any of life's many hard choices. Gilbert expands, "just remember, when you're in the course of a difficult decision or when you look back on that difficult decision in decades to follow, that you made the best choice you could, given what you had." It's easy for people — but perhaps especially for women — to beat themselves up over decision they made in the past. To honor your past self, to respect the choices she made and understand that she did the best she could, is a difficult thing, but ultimately freeing. It's good that Gilbert — who has probably done and said plenty of things she regrets — understands this.

Big Think Interview With Elizabeth Gilbert [Big Think]
Interview Transcript [Big Think]

Speaking at the 2009 Technology, Entertainment, and Design conference, Gilbert said we put too much pressure on artists and other creative people by holding them responsible for their own inspiration:

Allowing somebody ... to believe that he or she is ... the essence and the source of all divine, creative, unknowable, internal mystery is just like a smidge of too much responsibility to put on one fragile human psyche [...] It's like asking somebody to swallow the sun. It just completely warps and distorts egos, and it creates all of these unnatural expectations about performance. I think the pressure of that has been killing off our artists for the last 500 years.

Instead, she advocates a return to a pre-Renaissance attitude in which creativity was believed to come from the outside, from "a magical divine entity" or "mystical fairy juice." Artists would feel better, she says, if they accepted that their creative impulses didn't come from them, but were instead "on loan to you from some unimaginable source for some exquisite portion of your life, which you pass along when you're finished to somebody else."

Focusing too much on one's own greatness or lack thereof can drive anybody off their rocker, but this "mythical fairy juice" smacks of New Age faux-religiosity to us. If you believe in God, then divine inspiration makes sense — but if all you've got is "some unimaginable source," is this vague spirituality really all that helpful? Leaving the spiritual question aside, the biggest problem for most artists/writers/creative people in general isn't crushing societal expectations — it's money. Give me reliable health insurance and I'll believe in whatever fairy juice you want.

TED: Eat, Pray, Love Author on How We Kill Geniuses [Wired]

The book is called Six-Word Memoirs on Love & Heartbreak by Writers Famous & Obscure, and it includes such gems as "My life's accomplishments? Sanity, and you" (Elizabeth Gilbert), and "It's just a matter of luck" (Ayelet Waldman). What do you think: six word fad — cute or over? [USA Today]

You'd think someone who wrote a book on self-examination would learn to avoid saying things like, "I had an easier life than [my sister] did because I had an easier personality and it was easier for people to be sweet to me," and following that up with "I'm a physically lazy person. My sister was tougher and stronger and more disciplined. It was easier to do my chores for me than to get me to do them."

Lazy or no, it was Gilbert's early success that made her thirties so difficult for her.

I'd [...] lived a very accelerated decade in my 20s. My career started young and I was really ambitious, and then I had success and I hung out with people who were much older. I think I might have been temporally misplaced, so I thought I was 40. It was a premature midlife crisis.

The only thing less sympathetic than a midlife crisis is a midlife crisis that happens early because — oops! — I thought I was forty. But writers in particular will enjoy this description of Gilbert's early years:

After college, Gilbert knew she wanted to be a writer and also that her modest Connecticut background didn't furnish her with enough material. So she took off to have as many story-inspiring experiences as she could. She went to Wyoming to work as a cowhand; she got a rite-of-passage bar job in New York.

Once she was done providing herself with "experiences" (which some people get just by living), Gilbert sold a story to Esquire, and one to GQ that became the film Coyote Ugly. But she's happy that the big success of Eat Pray Love has come now, when she's "nearly 40 not 22," has "a solid relationship," and is equipped to deal with it.

Annoying as this all is, Gilbert does appear to have been set up. Early on in the piece, interviewer Emma Brockes writes, "there are lots of paths to self-discovery, but most of them don't conflate so many lucrative book markets in one handy volume," and describes Eat Pray Love's genre as "a strain of confessional publishing I once heard described as 'women who write about their yeast infections.'" It's possible Brockes is suffering from a little sour grapes, and to be fair, so are we. Which is (one of the reasons) why we didn't do an interview with Elizabeth Gilbert — we'll just link to it instead.

Lucky Me [Guardian]

Earlier: Did Eat, Pray, Love Sell Millions Because Elizabeth Gilbert Cheated On Her Husband?
Self Editor Follows Eat, Pray, Love Around The World — And Hates It!
You Will Hate Elizabeth Gilbert For Making You Love Eat, Pray, Love

The Good:
Amy Poehler: Actress, comedienne, Christian Siriano copycat.
I can only hope that Angelica Huston was invited for her amazing turn in The Darjeeling Limited as a mother/Buddhist nun who doesn't know what to talk about when we talk about love.
Ann Moore, left, is the CEO of Time, Inc. Indra Nooyi, right, is the CEO of Pepsi Co. Donatella Versace would be happy, surely, to see women in power wearing dresses.
Arianna Huffington: She writes books, she runs blogs, she wears ballgowns.
Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, which was apparently a little smug, highly readable and very "influential." (I hate that word.)
Georgina Chapman designs for Marchesa and married Harvey Weinstein. I'm not sure if these things, independently or together, make her a person of merit. But what do I know?
Kristen Wiig of SNL: Further proof that women are funny.
Madeeha Hasan Odhaib is the "Mother Theresa of Baghdad." I wonder if George Bush, or even fellow attendee John McCain, even care.
I love Martha Stewart: She runs an empire and still manages to can her own preserves. Also, she does it in heels.
Mary Lou Jepsen founded Pixel Qi and was also the founding Chief Technology Officer of One Laptop Per Child, which strives to deliver mesh-networked laptops to children in developing countries.
Nancy Brinker, who founded Susan G. Komen for the Cure, is a breast cancer survivor and mother, and was also appointed to the position of Chief of Protocol by President Bush.
Rupert Murdoch and Wendi Deng: The dark overlord and his whipsmart wife.
Suzanne Vega: She sings.
Sure Baby Mama is supposed to be the anti-Knocked Up or whatever, but more importantly, Tina Fey has brought Liz Lemon and Tracey Jordan into our lives.
Did you participate in Teach for America? Or have eighty gajilliion friends who did? Thank Wendy Kopp, who founded the program, for the experience.
Ziyi Zhang: She acts. Also I am in awe of her bone structure.

[Images via Getty.]

• Actually be convincingly depressed Holly says she got the idea to travel the world while reading a "galley" of the book — she's a women's magazine writer, natch! — and was struck by a scene in the beginning where Elizabeth Gilbert cries in the bathroom and thinks about killing herself. Holly likens that scene to a scene in her own life wherein she crosses the Williamsburg Bridge and gets weepy. There are a few crucial differences between Holly and Liz Gilbert's stories, however: namely, Holly is a 26-year-old unmarried magazine editor who lives in Brooklyn, and Lizzie is a 35-year-old writer who lives in the middle of nowhere in a loveless marriage. Also, Liz has a knife in her hand with which she intends to cut herself; I don't think it's even possible to jump off the Williamsburg Bridge — and you'd probably totally live anyway. During this experience, Holly thinks of Eat, Pray, Love, and her career. Liz prays to God. Which brings us to our second area Holly doesn't seem to take seriously enough.
  
• Involve God You say, "Unlike in Eat, Pray, Love, not everyone is going to find God in an ashram. I got red-eye virus." Um, Holly, ever read the Book Of Job? Elizabeth Gilbert's time at her ashram didn't sound so hot either — getting up at 4 a.m. to meditate every day and eating nothing but non-root vegetables? Nevertheless, God — and enduring shitty, repetitive routines that require waking up at ungodly hours — are two mainstays of Middle America. Otherwise known as "your market." Oh, you just did it for the spiritual growth and self-actualization, you say? Whatever, I saw your blog.
  
• Don't be a "backpacker." Where Elizabeth Gilbert settles down for four months at a time in Italy, India, and Indonesia, Holly's trip knows no such cute first-initial limitations. She goes to Indonesia and India, sure, but also Thailand, Cambodia, the United Arab Emirates, Peru, Brazil, Kenya, Myanmar, Vietnam, New Zealand and Australia. We know, we know, you're just another New York gal trying to "have it all"— but the one thing we've found in our travels is that a lot of times the most-traveled people we know, the "backpacker" types, are also the least satisfied. They're always looking for the next undiscovered beach, the cheapest hole-in-the-wall Thai food, the coolest dive bar/prettiest whores/weirdest extreme sport whatevs. Yeah, Vietnam's okayyyy, Laos is charming, but Bhutan is where you really have to go...blah blah blah. Not only do none of these people actually stay long enough to learn anything about the country they're inhabiting, but they're also too busy "getting stranded in the desert in Peru at high noon with the condors flying overhead or sleeping in a bed infested with cockroaches in Kenya" to have much downtime to think about their destructive patterns and/or poor choices and all the other instrospective shit that makes up the bulk of Eat, Pray, Love, right? Which brings me to:
  
• Don't bring your friends. Hello! There's a reason Elizabeth Gilbert didn't bring her two besties. Traveling anywhere with other Manhattan media people is just a 24-hour-a-day exercise in "Hell Is Other People." Surely at Self you went on junkets and experienced this. How are you supposed to "find yourself" when you're constantly finding out new hateful things about your best friends?
  
• When your little journey of self-promotion comes to an end and you return to life in Manhattan only to find yourself depressed, don't expect anyone to give a shit. Seriously, so you return to a club in the Meatpacking District and find it suddenly meaningless? That is your big takeaway? What about explaining how you managed not to find it meaningless before? Moreover, your relationship was obviously going to fall apart. Who takes a year to explore the world and returns back to their boyfriend in Brooklyn STILL MADLY IN LOVE? No one does, because no one fucking does that if they still love their boyfriend. And oh, you've met another guy you "totally click with" named Bryant? I bet he's toured the world too, maybe with his private equity firm? Well congrats, but that makes it even harder to feel sorry for you. And listen, I hope your blog about the adventures of turning 30 works out better, I really do. But even if it doesn't...
  
• Liz Gilbert was a whole nine or so years older than you when she took on all this stuff. So don't despair! You have decades left to turn your life into a bestseller.

Isn't she a little too nice and funny and likable to be for real? Isn't that a major reason this book is so goddamn popular? Because you're like, well shit lady, you cheated on your husband and now you're charming the bejesus out of middle American housewives all the way to the bank! Or am I just a terrible person? You've gotta read it to decide for yourself! TGIF, right?

From Hardcover To Paper, How A Blockbuster Was Born [WSJ]

me: My theory is that you disliked 'Eat Pray Love' because you were married, happy, fulfilled and in the logical context of a book club when you read it while I was a sobbing, existential crisis-ridden, heartbroken, disconnected mess reading it in the context of the Chinatown bus, which might as well be hell.
Stephanie: um, except that it become really obvious in the first 100 pages that she cheated on her husband. and hello. the whole reason she could take months to go to 3 countries and meditate was that she got a book deal. and the whole not having sex thing in the last part? yeah, self centered. And we all know she made her money from that movie with the girls dancing on the bar
me: OK, agreed on all counts. In fact, now that I think about it, I feel like it's almost sinister that she drew me, the dumpee, into her journey of self-discovery when hello SHE CHEATED.
Stephanie: yeah, if he cheated, i would have been right there eating the pizza with her. Instead, secretly i was happy she was getting fat. I hope her ex took her for everything. Or at least, the house
me: She made it seem like her did.That was actually the most off-putting part. That she harped, a little too much, on her ex's inability to forgive her. Without saying exactly what she had done.
Stephanie: yeah, and then she climbs a tower and "lets him go"... um, that's what his lawyer is for
me: And considering the compulsive-confessional gene that runs through people like that... not that I would know... You know she wrote a lot about whatever infidelity occurred. She probably wrote tomes. And then her publisher said: "Actually, we want to get this excerpted in 'O', so....can you kinda make yourself a little more sympathetic?
Stephanie: What about when she decided to stop taking the anti-depressants? No one that's been dumped goes OFF the antidepressants. yeah, i'm in a foreign country. i know no one. let's let the seratonin go...
me: She also writes almost too precisely about certain huge gushes of emotion for them to have been anything other than, you know, fairly isolated occurrences. Which is why it's so annoying that her book made me cry so much!
Stephanie: so many people loved it. I kept thinking, this woman, THIS woman is speaking for everyone who's ever broken up?
me: Right, I kept thinking, here's this book deal lady, sellout writer of the movie that introduced the world to Piper Perabo, who cheated on her husband with the lead in the play version of another of her astoundly successful books, hanging out in Italy... and she's making me cry. As if I needed another reason. As if I really needed a good fucking cry right now! Because it's been a WHOLE THIRTY MINUTES SINCE THE LAST.
Stephanie: oh no! oh no! think of the vibrator scene... that'll dry you up
me: you mean where she masturbates while thinking of Bill Clinton?
Stephanie: Yes. at that point i closed the book and vowed never to read GQ again
me: Yeah, that's a good point. Do people really masturbate thinking of Bill Clinton? Would you get off on Clinton dirtytalk? Because, as badly as I'd like him back in the White House, I would not want to have his cigar up my cooch. I can't really get off on the idea of known lechers trying to get in my pants. With Clinton I would not feel special. I would feel like the proverbial hole and a heartbeat. Although, for masturbation purposes, that should probably be sufficient. Anyway, whatever, it kind of weirded me out that he was her default fantasy. She's actually got a Clintonesque charisma; I met her once. She came to the office. Everyone LOVED her.
Stephanie: of course. she's blond. how could you not love a peppy petite blond woman. i bet she's super thin, right? that would make sense. She can eat pizza and not worry about it
me: She was wearing a weird asymmetrically cut sweater. She's definitely in good shape but I wasn't like, having an envy attack over her body
Stephanie: oh, that makes me like her a smidge more
me: Her LIFE, on the other hand..Also: she married Felipe or whatever his name was from Indonesia by way of Brazil
Stephanie: of course it all worked out for her. where is her husband now?
me: It's almost too perfect.
Stephanie: i bet her new husband cheats on her. it's like the j. timberlake song. and i'll bet they totally have kids. Because that's the reason she gave for breaking up with her 1st husband. She didn't want kids.
me: So you hated her instantly and reading the book was a masochistic exercise? Or did you only hate it after you were done?
Stephanie: i hated it while reading it. i just don't think the dump-er is entitled to the same misery as the dump-ee. I kept thinking, who the hell does she think she is?! YOU did this, now lay in it. and stop bringing up how much money you make
me: I would not want to know what goes through her ex's mind when he looks at the Book Review bestseller lists every Sunday. I don't think it's a good place.
Stephanie: i think her husband should have burned her clothes like that movie with angela basset
Stephanie: or her books, whichever. God, think of HIS therapy bills