“He’s writing his own book, so you’ll learn soon,” says Elizabeth Gilbert, curled up in a chair with a cup of tea.
I had asked how her ex-husband, Michael Cooper, feels about Eat Pray Love, her enormously successful 2006 memoir about her search for happiness in Italy, India and Indonesia, following the bitter end of their marriage. The book has sold more than seven million copies. The movie adaptation, starring Julia Roberts and Javier Bardem as her lover – and now husband – Felipe, comes out this summer.
Its popularity also helped catapult her recent memoir, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage, to the top of the bestsellers list. Mr. Cooper’s memoir, Displaced, which is reportedly a rebuttal, chronicling his side of their breakup, will be published in the fall.
How does she feel about that?
She shrugs, smiles weakly. “It is what it is.”
Is she scared?
“No, not fear,” she says, shaking her head. “I need to choose my words carefully,” she says after a pause.
But why would he be doing a book, if not to bring her down somehow or bask in some reflected glory?
“We’ll see,” she continues lightly.
“It’s not a lawsuit. It’s under his control. It’s his realm. It doesn’t drag me into anything that will have an impact on my life.” She takes a sip of her chamomile tea.
Nothing seems to faze Ms. Gilbert, who shifts from a beatific, Buddhist-like tea-offering calm only when she shows curiosity or when she unleashes one of her throaty laughs. She is all Smile Talk Laugh.
Committed, which works as a sequel to Eat Pray Love, explores her trepidation about remarrying. “The ambivalence wasn’t ‘Should I get married?’ That was a given,” she says. “The ambivalence was all around how do you do this without feeling like you’re being forcibly marched into a form that’s obsolete, that’s politically disadvantageous to women in the extreme, that has an egregious history of injustice and misery and that you personally have a horrible history of misery with? Is there a little spot in there where you can rest at ease, and how do you find it?”
The book was prompted when she returned to the United States with Felipe, the Brazilian boyfriend she met in Indonesia. An airport Homeland Security officer pulled him aside to question him on his visa then suggested it would be better if they got married. Without hesitation, they decided they would, and for the year spent in “rootless exile” awaiting the slow bureaucratic wheels to turn so they could return to the United States together, Ms. Gilbert read and thought and wrote about marriage.
Part memoir, part history of marriage and part sociology report on marital trends, divorce statistics and couples expert advice, her new book has not been as well received. The reader knows from the start where Ms. Gilbert and her boyfriend will end up, and some of her ruminations seem a little overwrought. She jettisoned a 500-page draft and started over when she decided that the charming, girlish voice of Eat Pray Love was somehow unbecoming for a woman about to turn 40.
She’s aware of the backlash her success has inspired, but responds to it with her signature calm. “I don’t think there’s a way you can get this much attention and not have some negative feedback,” she says.
Anyway, the deliberation about marriage helped her, she says. “I have to say I came away from the whole endeavour with a peculiar respect for marriage … At a Darwinian level, I found there to be something amazing because this thing endures so stubbornly. It endures because it evolves.”
