Jami Attenberg: I have to preface this by saying I was 75% predisposed to like Eat, Pray, Love. I enjoyed the book version a great deal, I practice yoga and meditation and I love food porn in movies.

Jami: The other 25% was Julia Roberts.

Maura Johnston: Oh Julia.

Jami: She wearies me. She talks about her husband too much in interviews.

Maura: I like her, but I think 67% of my predisposition toward her is because of My Best Friend's Wedding.

Jami: She never ever has any girlfriends in any of her movies. She doesn't do well with women.

Jami: And yet she is America's sweetheart.

Rudely spurned by customs, refused entry to the United States, a divorced gem-dealer and his insanely wealthy divorced memoirist lady-friend are forced to hop about a small portion of the globe, taking in Bali, Indonesia, Laos and a few other attractive neighboring countries. The print run? ONE MILLION COPIES. The authoress? Elizabeth Gilbert, reports the Times. Yes, our Eat, Pray, Love friend. It's like that Dave Eggers book, except in reverse, mashed up with Greg Lindsay and Alain de Botton except with long diary entries about the fear of intimacy. (With a little bit of Democracy maybe?) Also it apparently is written in an entirely different [...]

"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, [...]

"Committed is an unfurling of 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 on Elizabeth Gilbert on marriage, which is pretty much all you should need to hear to go a-clicking through.