A year after completely scrapping a 500-page follow-up to “Eat, Pray, Love,” Elizabeth Gilbert’s mega-best-selling spiritual travelogue, she has delivered a new book that Viking will publish in January.
Titled “Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage,” the book is a memoir of a tumultuous year that came 18 months after “Eat, Pray, Love” leaves off, as well as a meditation on wedlock.
Ms. Gilbert, 40, said the book, which recounts how she came to marry the Brazilian-born Australian lover she met in Indonesia in “Eat, Pray, Love,” was not just a straightforward memoir of what happened and how she felt about it.
In exploring her deep ambivalence about marriage — having vowed never to remarry after the painful divorce that triggered the wanderings chronicled in “Eat, Pray, Love” — she read historical and sociological studies. She also interviewed family members and friends, and talked to people whom she and José Nunes (then her companion, called Felipe in the book), met during 10 months in Southeast Asia. In “Committed” she weaves her reflections on this material into her own experiences.
“It is and isn’t a sequel,” Ms. Gilbert said in a telephone interview from near their home in Frenchtown, N.J. “It’s the same two characters, but it’s a very different setting and emotional backdrop. The second book has more of an academic contemplation and more of my family in it.”
One hit wonder or better?
Given the phenomenal paperback success of “Eat, Pray, Love” — it spent 57 weeks at the No. 1 spot on the New York Times paperback nonfiction best-seller list and has remained on the list — the new title will be watched closely by fans and publishing insiders to see if Ms. Gilbert has lasting power.
Viking, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA), which published “Eat, Pray, Love” in 2006, is announcing a first print run for “Committed” of one million copies in hardcover. (Although such numbers are known to be widely exaggerated, they indicate the publisher’s ambitions.) According to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of sales, “Eat, Pray, Love” sold nearly four million copies in paperback.
When Ms. Gilbert signed a two-book deal with Viking for a novel and another work of nonfiction in 2006, “Eat, Pray, Love” had just been published in hardcover to mostly good reviews, but had not yet achieved its remarkable sales record. Ms. Gilbert thought she wanted to write a novel about the Amazon, and had a more amorphous idea for a nonfiction book about creativity.
But in May of that year, Ms. Gilbert said, Mr. Nunes was detained in Dallas as the couple were returning from a trip to France. After hours of questioning, immigration officials told the couple that the simplest way for Mr. Nunes to be allowed back into the country was for them to marry.
A book is born
With divorce behind them both, neither wanted marriage. But they did want to build a life in the United States. Mr. Nunes had already established a business importing gemstones and jewelry to the United States, and Ms. Gilbert said she wanted to have a home base near her American family. As they waited to clear the bureaucratic hurdles to gain Mr. Nunes’s re-entry into the United States, the couple traveled to Australia, Bali, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. Out of this exile a book idea about marriage was born.
“I spent about 10 months trying to learn as much as I could possibly learn about this very frustrating, contradictory and ultimately interesting human habit,” Ms. Gilbert said. “I was trying to wrap my mind around it or gain enough perspective to feel that I could gain a place within it that didn’t feel coerced.”
The couple finally got permission for Mr. Nunes to re-enter the United States in 2007, and they married that year. Ms. Gilbert started writing a book she tentatively called “Weddings and Evictions.” In late 2007 Viking promoted it in the back of at least 200,000 copies of “Eat, Pray, Love,” describing it as a memoir about Ms. Gilbert’s “unexpected journey into second marriage” and promising publication in 2009.
When she finished a draft in May 2008, she took it to a copy shop to print out a first version. As soon as she began paging through it, she recoiled. “It was different from just the anxiety and insecurities that you feel when you’re writing something,” she said. “It was nondebatable.”
Without showing it to Paul Slovak, Viking’s publisher and Ms. Gilbert’s editor, she wrote asking for a deferral on her deadline. Mr. Slovak, although concerned that the follow-up to the blockbuster not take too long, gave her another year.
Ms. Gilbert said she never could read the first draft in its entirety. She identified the problem as a clash of two voices: one, “an ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ hangover,” — the chatty, witty tone that earned Ms. Gilbert her good reviews and loyal fans — and the other, “more sober and considered and confident and mature.”
After taking six months off, Ms. Gilbert decided she could write again, this time in what she believed was a more authentic voice. “I was scared that all the people who loved ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ might not want to read that new voice,” she said. “But I knew that if I didn’t do it that way it would just be a lousy book.”
Mr. Slovak, who never saw the original draft, said the new book, which runs around 300 pages, had retained the familiar tone of the earlier work. “It’s unmistakably her voice in this new book,” he said.
Ms. Gilbert knows that some knives may be out for her as she embarks on the publicity for the new memoir.
“There’s something very scary about having millions of people waiting to see what you’re going to do next,” she said. “The people who love ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ are very dear and are very encouraging, but they also have their expectations.”
“But the impossibilities of meeting the expectations of millions of people,” she added, “have been well chronicled.”
This story, "Eat, Pray, Love. Then What? Get Married" originally appeared in The New York Times.