Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period. ||||| January 2010 
 
 The Elizabeth Gilbert Experience 
 
 Before last week, I hadn’t read Eat, Pray, Love. That’s when I finally tore into Elizabeth Gilbert’s smash 2006 bestseller, right before reading her new memoir -- Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage, a sharp, contemplative follow-up out this month -- and Stern Men, a lovely, surprising novel she published in 2000, when the idea that she might one day be considered a sort of lifestyle guru would have just seemed weird. All three books were really good -- in quite different ways -- and together they form a picture of a writer who is far more interesting than the frenzy surrounding her breakout hit suggests. 
 
 Eat, Pray, Love didn’t upend my world, but I liked it a whole lot, and I can even understand why other people lost their minds over it. For me, though, the most amazing thing was that the book, reputed to have some connection to chick-lit, was somehow, magically, not annoying -- even when it seemed like it should have been, as when Gilbert goes on at length about prayer and God and connecting to the universe. This miraculous non-annoyingness was what struck me most immediately, but the book has plenty of merits that don’t need to be qualified: it’s absorbing and funny, and Gilbert leaves herself admirably and appealingly exposed. It’s actually hard to be cynical about it. 
 
 Gilbert has a seemingly well-deserved reputation for being generous, smart, and supremely likeable. Of course, that reputation is based mostly on how she appears in Eat, Pray, Love: frazzled, searching, brave, compassionate, flawed -- the kind of woman that other women (and not a few men) feel like they know, are, or in some sense would like to be. But I’m a little wary of this drive to identify so closely with a writer-cum-character, which was part of the reason I had avoided Eat, Pray, Love in the first place. 
 
 After its success, Gilbert’s next book is, inevitably, an opportunity for her to choose between confirming or complicating her crunchy soothsayer image. In Committed, she gets right to the point, with an unusually direct “Note to the Reader,” in which she explains who she was before Eat, Pray, Love unexpectedly took the world by storm, and transformed her -- at least in the public eye -- into a very different kind of writer than she had been. She writes: 
 
 Before Eat, Pray, Love, I had been known in literary circles (if I was known at all) as a woman who wrote predominantly for, and about, men. I’d been working for years as a journalist for such male-focused magazines as GQ and Spin, and I had used those pages to explore masculinity from every possible angle. Similarly, the subjects of my first three books (both fiction and nonfiction) were all supermacho characters: cowboys, lobster fisherman, hunters, truckers, Teamsters, woodsmen… Back then, I was often told that I wrote like a man. Now, I’m not entirely sure what writing “like a man” even means, but I do believe it is generally intended as a compliment. I certainly took it as a compliment at the time. 
 
 When Eat, Pray, Love became a huge bestseller, Gilbert continues, “I suddenly found myself -- after a decade spent writing exclusively about men and maleness -- being referred to as a chick-lit author. Again, I’m not entirely sure what ‘chick-lit’ even means, but I’m pretty certain it’s never intended as a compliment.” 
 
 That’s a pretty loaded way to preface the book -- a deeply personal look at the social history and experience of marriage -- as well as an unusually straightforward way for a writer to address who she is in relation to her work, and how the reception of that work has shaped her writing. Not to mention a stark rejoinder to those who would love to reduce her to the soul-searching heroine of Eat, Pray, Love. There’s plenty of soul-searching in these pages, too, but for those who come to Committed looking for Eat, Pray, Love: The Sequel -- and there will be many -- Gilbert’s note signals that while she’s interested in thinking about how her readers see her, she’s less invested in satisfying their expectations, since she never set out to do so in the first place. 
 
 It’s hard to think of another writer who has published a book that so perfectly appeals to female readers, and could earlier have been said to “write like a man.” Gilbert didn’t set out to do this; she’d had some respectable literary success with Pilgrims, her collection of short stories; Stern Men (the novel), and her 2002 biography of Eustace Conway, The Last American Man (as well as, it must be said, a 1997 GQ article that was adapted into the movie Coyote Ugly). Then her marriage fell apart and she fell into an all-consuming, ultimately impossible relationship, and she decided she needed to spend a year eating lots of pasta in Italy, mediating at an ashram in India and chilling out in Indonesia -- and she wrote about the experience, because she’s a writer, and that’s what she does. The book that resulted was far more personal (at least in the obvious ways) than her earlier efforts. But it also seemed to come naturally. Gilbert was lucky to be able to travel for a semi-blissful year, and lucky that her journey struck such a nerve, but she didn’t write the book knowing that it would transform her life. The events she describes in the book, after all, had already done that. 
 
 Which brings us back to Committed. While in Bali, Gilbert met and fell in love with a Brazilian-born Australian citizen who she calls Felipe. Both scarred by divorce, they vowed to be together forever, but never to get married. Then Felipe, a near-constant international traveler, was coming back to the States with Gilbert after a routine stint away when he got nabbed by Homeland Security during the heyday of the Bush administration. He was forbidden from entering the U.S. ever again -- unless he and Gilbert got married. Effectively “sentenced to wed,” if the couple wanted to continue to live in the U.S. or ever visit it together, marriage was a bullet that needed to be bitten. Committed is the product of Gilbert’s months spent sifting through the history of marriage in a concentrated effort to find a place for herself and her relationship in an institution she’d sworn off. 
 
 Of course, many of the readers who relished Eat, Pray, Love -- many of the people in the world, in general -- don’t approach marriage with such skepticism. Gilbert knows this, explaining eloquently, “[J]ust as a sworn engagement can bring to so many other couples a sensation of encircling protection, our vow never to marry had cloaked the two of us in all the emotional security we required in order to try once more at love.” So while her journey in Eat, Pray, Love may be deeply symbolic to many women, who see themselves in her or are inspired by her quest, in Committed, Gilbert makes a point of (rather gently) insisting that the story she was telling in that book was her own. There was a real person doing all of those things, with her own ideas about what they meant. The way she dealt with her life after that extraordinary year actually says more about what kind of person she is and what matters to her. Committed is just as pleasurable as her previous book -- intensely thoughtful and personal -- but it makes no secret of her frustration with a set of traditions many people take for granted. 
 
 Gilbert really doesn’t want to get married. And she definitely doesn’t want to have children. The U.S. government is forcing her to compromise on the former, but the latter is non-negotiable. And so this book project was driven not by the luxury of simple intellectual curiosity, but by the necessity of reconciling herself with what she has to do. She doesn’t hesitate to cherry-pick facts and theories along the way, but she points out that this is what we all do in order to come to terms with such a fraught institution, whether we love the idea of getting married, or disdain it. 
 
 She’s hardly the first person to write a book on the subject; for years, writers of all agendas have ably twisted the meaning of marriage to support whatever conclusions they’ve already drawn. Gilbert argues convincingly that history doesn’t support any one philosophy except that marriage is ever-changing, and she finally finds solace in the idea that, as she writes, “It is not we as individuals… who must bend uncomfortably around the institution of marriage; rather, it is the institution of marriage that has to bend uncomfortably around us.” Her politics and past certainly inform her search, but she’s much more open about the fuzziness of it all, making Committed one of the wisest and most sensitive explorations of marriage -- or really, relationships in general -- I’ve read. 
 
 Coming off that high, I picked up Gilbert’s novel Stern Men, a hearty tale of two rival communities of lobster fishermen in Maine, and the spunky, complicated young woman caught ambivalently in their orbit. The book is great: tart and dryly funny and wonderfully crowded and (for exactly two pages) incredibly hot. I know what people mean when they say Gilbert was writing “like a man”: In part, I suppose, the book reads like the work of someone steeped in literature and ideas more than emotions (though really, the point of all this is that we, and our writers, shouldn’t have to choose between them). And it does seem to have been written by a different person than the vulnerable, personal voice of Eat, Pray, Love. 
 
 But it wasn’t. Sure, Gilbert has been vocal about the ways she’s changed since her divorce and the unexpected onset of celebrity, and so in some ways she is a different person: more confident, happier, and perhaps more inclined to write in the style that brought her so much success. Still, Committed is not really so far away from Stern Men. In both, Gilbert comes off as a writer skilled with both words and feelings, unwilling to be boxed in. Eat, Pray, Love was a feat, but it’s something of an outlier. It doesn’t make sense to define her by it. ||||| Committed 
 
 A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage 
 
 By Elizabeth Gilbert 
 
 (Viking; 285 pages; $26.95) 
 
 "Committed," the new memoir by Elizabeth Gilbert, is being billed as sort of a sequel to "Eat, Pray, Love," no doubt to lure back readers who made her first memoir a runaway best-seller. 
 
 For anyone who has been in a coma, "Eat, Pray, Love" was a zeitgeist book - in sales terms, "The Da Vinci Code" for the memoir set - hovering at the top of the list for four years. This is partly due to its subject matter. Following an acrimonious divorce, Gilbert secured a book contract that paid for a year of solo travel, to regain her joie de vivre by doing exactly what she wanted, all the time. Critics faulted her for being self-indulgent, but that was her stated purpose. 
 
 Gilbert is, in Oprah terms, "a pleaser." She prides herself on being able to make friends with anyone, and hates conflict. This is how she got stuck in a marriage (and a dull suburban life) she didn't want. Many readers related to her predicament, and lived vicariously through her cure as she chronicled it. Her most devoted fans have actually crossed the globe, tracing her footsteps to the Naples pizzeria she hit on her "no carbs left behind tour," to the ashram in India where she chanted for months, and finally to Bali, where she found sustainable balance between overindulgence and asceticism. 
 
 She also found a happily-ever-after ending, falling in love with an older Brazilian man known to readers as "Felipe" - a happy ending that did not include a wedding. He too had suffered a painful divorce, and they swore, "to never, under any circumstances, marry." Privately they pledged lifelong fidelity, and relocated from Bali to (go figure) suburban Philadelphia. But upon attempting to return from a trip abroad, Felipe was detained by Homeland Security and then informed that the only way he might be allowed to re-enter the United States was if he and Gilbert were to marry. 
 
 "In the space of only a few hours," writes Gilbert, "my life with Felipe had been neatly flipped upside down, as though by some great cosmic spatula." 
 
 Pragmatism trumps principles, and they agree to wed, but it takes 10 more months for the government to grant permission. So while they kick around Southeast Asia, "in a state of rootless exile," Gilbert tries to "make peace with the complicated institution of marriage." She undertakes this with almost nerdy studiousness, poring over history books sent by her librarian sister, and interviewing nearly everyone she meets about marital customs and mores. 
 
 True to claim, she excels at drawing people out of their shells, then bringing them to life for the reader. Some of the best scenes in the book show her chatting with unlikely new friends, like a Hmong hill tribe girl in Vietnam and a Laotian man who raises frog meat. Their lively conversations illustrate the different cultural expectations that we bring to marriage, and she concludes that these people seem more content with their marriages because they ask less of them. "Perhaps I was loading a far heavier cargo of expectation onto that creaky old boat of matrimony than that strange vessel had ever been built to accommodate." 
 
 The book is strongest when Gilbert focuses on telling her own story. By contrast, heavily researched chapters like "Marriage and History" feel more academic, which would be OK except that she is not making a coherent argument about marriage so much as trying to talk herself into it. At these times, the narrative can feel as directionless as the couple lumbering under their heavy backpacks. Commitment is no escapist fantasy. Felipe does not share Gilbert's zeal for life on the road - he yearns for a coffee pot, symbol of home - and his weariness rubs off on her. At one point, she leaves him to travel to Cambodia, only to find the crushing poverty nearly unbearable. In a wrenching episode that causes her shame, she runs away from a group of begging children who try to trip her. 
 
 There is a reason comedies often end with the wedding: Falling in love is sexy; commitment is a grind. While Gilbert and Felipe have to wait until the end of the book for their wedding ceremony, their peripatetic life is far more taxing than a settled marriage, as they struggle to make different temperaments and travel styles mesh. She renders their frustrations convincingly, but readers who delighted in the joie de vivre that bubbled throughout "Eat, Pray, Love" may find this comparatively dreary. 
 
 Still, while "Eat, Pray, Love" struck a chord by giving "pleasers" permission to please themselves for a change, it's Gilbert's voice that accounted for its phenomenal success. Smart but unpretentious, funny, warm and generous, this is the same voice behind "Committed." By the end of one of her books, you feel as if she is your friend too. It's a pleasure to be back in that friend's company again. 
 
 This article appeared on page FE - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle ||||| Late one cold November night, in the suburbs of New York, a thirty-one-year-old blonde was sobbing on her bathroom floor. She didn’t want to be married anymore, she realized: “I was trying so hard not to know this, but the truth kept insisting itself to me.” She had accomplished a great deal, domestically speaking—she had answered the questions of where to live and with whom. Unfortunately, she had succeeded at the wrong life: “I don’t want to be married anymore. I don’t want to live in this big house. I don’t want to have a baby.” Elizabeth Gilbert recounted this crisis toward the beginning of her monstrously successful 2006 memoir, “Eat, Pray, Love.” In that bathroom, in that marriage, Gilbert was a heroine out of Ibsen, or possibly Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Marriage, in “Eat, Pray, Love,” is a prison, destined to derange its female inmates. But Gilbert’s memoir is a cultural artifact of the new millennium, not the late nineteenth century. The heroine wanted to roam free, and so she did. 
 
 After her divorce, Gilbert travelled across Italy, India, and Indonesia. Wanderlust is at the core of her nature. She has compared herself to “a fussy baby who can fall asleep only in a moving car.” Before Gilbert wrote her best-seller, she had already published “Pilgrims,” a short-story collection about drifters and pioneers, and “The Last American Man,” a biography of the contemporary naturalist Eustace Conway, who abandoned a comfortable suburban life to wear animal skins in the wilds of Appalachia, where he used a cave as his office. Gilbert has always been interested in restless characters seeking extraordinary experiences, and eventually she became one herself. 
 
 First came despair. Gilbert was suicidal after her marriage ended, sitting, at one point, with kitchen knife in hand, contemplating her wrists. She writes that she “became a student of my own depressed experience.” Research has long been Gilbert’s preferred coping mechanism. When she was still married and trying to decide whether to have children, she “spent two frantic years interviewing every woman I could—married, single, childless, artistic, archetypically maternal,” in an attempt to divine her own optimal path. She even does this with problems that don’t seem particularly problematic: in Italy, she set herself the challenge of learning how pleasure is “most efficiently maximized,” studying her subject “like a homework assignment.” (She had other high-class difficulties to ponder during the yearlong journey that provided the source material for “Eat, Pray, Love.” “Here’s what’s strange,” she observes at one point. “I haven’t seemed to be able to do any yoga since getting to Rome.”) 
 
 It does not take a lot to get Gilbert worked up. A medicine man she met in Bali once told her, “You have more good luck than anyone I’ve ever met.” Then he diagnosed her defect: “Always you get too emotional.” A few years later, she returns to see him again, and at first he doesn’t recognize her. Here is how Gilbert describes the experience: 
 
 
 
 
 
 It’s like I was in a car accident, and my car went over a bridge and sank to the bottom of a river and I’d somehow managed to free myself from the sunken car by swimming through an open window and then I’d been frog-kicking and struggling to swim all the way up to the daylight through the cold, green water and I was almost out of oxygen and the arteries were bursting out of my neck and my cheeks were puffed with my last breath and then—GASP!—I broke through to the surface and took in huge gulps of air. And I survived. That gasp, that breaking through—this is what it feels like when I hear the Indonesian medicine man say, “You came back!” My relief is exactly that big. 
 
 
 
 
 
 Keeping things in perspective is not Gilbert’s strong suit. This is why she goes on so many trips and does so much information gathering: she wants to understand how her fellow-humans have resolved the issues that torment her. 
 
 So we should not be surprised that when Gilbert found herself on the verge of a second wedding, in a state of dread, she decided “to put a little effort into unraveling the mystery of what in the name of God and human history this befuddling, vexing, contradictory, and yet stubbornly enduring institution of marriage actually is.” She consulted books and scholars. She interviewed Hmong grandmothers in the mountains of Vietnam about their level of marital satisfaction. She went to see her grandmother. The result is Gilbert’s new book, a journey through domestic history and her own neuroses, “Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage” (Viking; $26.95). 
 
 Gilbert had not intended to remarry. Both she and her gentleman friend Felipe—a Brazilian gem trader she met in Bali, who provided her with passion and adoration and a tidy romantic ending for “Eat, Pray, Love”—had been “so badly gutted” by their divorces that they “had sworn with all our hearts to never, ever, under any circumstances, marry.” But Felipe is not an American citizen. After one too many trips to the United States to visit Gilbert and to sell his rocks, Felipe was taken away in handcuffs from immigration control at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, and told that he could not return to the U.S. unless he had an American wife. Gilbert, then, is “sentenced to marry,” and she’s none too pleased about it. “I felt mournful and sucker punched and heavy and banished from some fundamental aspect of my being,” she writes. “But most of all I felt caught.”
– Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert's new book, Committed, has our heroine coming to terms with marriage after swearing off the institution, with the aid of a lot of research. Some critics aren't convinced: "One generally doesn’t indulge another person’s emotional processing at this length unless the jabbering is likely to conclude with sex," Ariel Levy writes in the New Yorker. And that's not where the book goes—rather, it ends with "suspicious" "peace and contentment." The author "seems, at times, in her own uncomfortable, self-deprecating way, to be trying for a history or analysis of the institution of marriage," Katie Roiphe writes for DoubleX. "Her new status as bestselling author seems to have endowed her with some responsibility to write about the larger culture, which is the central problem with the book." That old Gilbert is still there, Malena Watrous writes in the San Francisco Chronicle, but "heavily researched chapters like 'Marriage and History' feel more academic, which would be OK except that she is not making a coherent argument about marriage so much as trying to talk herself into it." Yeah, it's not Eat, Pray, Love, rites Eryn Loeb of Bookslut. But it is good. Gilbert is "open about the fuzziness of it all, making Committed one of the wisest and most sensitive explorations of marriage—or really, relationships in general—I’ve read."