"Committed is an unfurling of [Elizabeth] Gilbert’s profound anxiety about reëntering a legally binding arrangement that she does not really believe in. All this ambivalence, expressed in her high-drama prose, can be a lot to handle. (One generally doesn’t indulge another person’s emotional processing at this length unless the jabbering is likely to conclude with sex.)" —Ariel Levy, The New Yorker, Jan. 11, 2010.

Here I am again, alone in the world, like a newborn baby coated in an amniotic layer of guilt. When I started writing this book, I thought it was going to be about the children that I was finally—finally!—going to have with my second husband, to whom this book is dedicated even though we're no longer together. That's right, I'm a divorcée again. I am the person that, deep within myself, hidden in the bottom-most, darkest, dustiest corner of my heart, I never wished to become, and yet became—twice. Despite all my best efforts to avoid the fate I seem to have been given due to some kind of unpleasant birthright—I am American, after all, and we do get divorced an awful lot—I have become the person you, if you have at least one cynical bone in your body, may have imagined I would become while reading unfavorable reviews of my last book. READ MORE 20