Committed, written by author of Eat, Pray, Love, takes off where Eat, Pray, Love ended. Elizabeth Gilbert is in a committed relationship with that sexy Brazilian she met in Bali. Homeland Security deported her sexy Brazilian and for them to live in the states together, they had to consider marriage. This book is Gilbert considering marriage, in the context of her own personal life. She drops in a few historical anecdotes here and there, but mostly she pulls from her own journey. Memories from her parents’ marriage, her friends’ marriage, her first marriage, and interviews with Southeast Asian people on their take. (Southeast Asia is where she and Felipe spent most of their time as they waited for his visa.)

After about 50 pages in, I stopped reading for months. It was a slow start. I just wasn’t interested in her story. In between books, I picked it up again and I’m glad I did.

I really enjoyed two things in particular. One was an analogy she stumbled on by psychologist, Shirley Glass regarding infidelity. She touches on friendships cultivated with people with whom one is attracted. Usually these friendships house innocent intentions. However, when marriages go through strife, as it inevitably will, it’s tempting to divulge intimate secrets in the spirit of venting. However, when one does this, he or she is not only allowing someone an intimate glimpse into his or her marriage, but is also shutting out the spouse in the process. There’s now a window where a wall should have been and a wall between husband and wife (or husband/husband, wife/wife). This may not lead to infidelity, but a house is being built for it. I loved this analogy.

The second thing I enjoyed was her open resentment against impossible societal pressures on women. My best friend has turned me into a budding feminist. As a budding feminist, my relationship with feminism consist of a lot of unsorted raw feelings. Eloquence escapes me when I try to give my thoughts and feelings a voice. I find myself leaning for the time being on what I read to help sort myself out.

All in all, I’m so glad I didn’t fully abandon this book.

Favorite Excerpts from Committed

… Nothing is wrong with a married person launching a friendship outside of matrimony – so long as the “walls and windows” of the relationship remain in the correct places. It was Glass’s theory that every healthy marriage is composed of walls and windows. The windows are the aspects of your relationships that are open to the world – that is, the necessary gaps through which you interact with family and friends; the walls are the barriers of trust behind which you guard the most intimate secrets of your marriage.

And this is my beef, by the way, with social conservatives who are always harping about how the most nourishing home for a child is a two-parent household with a mother in the kitchen. If I – as a beneficiary of that exact formula – will concede that my own life was indeed enriched by that precise familial structure, will the social conservatives please (for once!) concede that this arrangement has always put a disproportionately cumbersome burden on women? Such a system demands that mothers become selfless to the point of near invisibility in order to construct these exemplary environments for their families. And might those same social conservatives – instead of just praising mothers as “sacred” and “noble”- be willing to someday join a larger conversation about how we might work together as a society to construct a world where healthy children can be raised and healthy families can prosper without women having to scape bare the walls of their own souls to do it?

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I’ve had A Million Miles in a Thousand Years on my to-read list for a while. I think I was first interested in the book because I thought it had something to do with storytelling and I love me some books on writing and storytelling. (Check my post on Stephen King’s On Writing and Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird.) I finally got around to reading Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, and it is not exactly a book about writing.

Donald Miller, author of Blue Like Jazz, writes about how he was approached by the movie industry to turn his book into a movie. Through this experience, he learns that he wasn’t quite living a movie quality life. This catapulted him into exploring a new way of living. Live as if your life is a story. If your narrative is not worth watching in a movie, perhaps you’re doing it all wrong.

It was an interesting read and inspired me to examine my own life and question what kind of tale I’m weaving.

I find myself using book reviews as an excuse to share my favorite excerpts.

Favorite Excerpts from A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

My uncle told a good story with his life, but I think there was such a sadness at his funeral because his story wasn’t finished. If you aren’t telling a good story, nobody thinks you died too soon; they just think you died. But my uncle died too soon.

A story is a character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it.

I asked Bob what was the key to living such a great story, and Bob seemed uncomfortable with the idea he was anything special. But he wanted to answer my question, so he thought about it and said he didn’t think we should be afraid to embrace whimsy. I asked him what he meant by whimsy, and he struggled to define it. He said it’s that nagging idea that life should be magical; it could be special if we were only willing to take a few risks.

I looked across the deck at Steve and Ben sitting and talking to Jim, and as they laughed and drank their wine, I wondered how much it costs to be rich in friends and how many years and stories and scenes it takes to make a rich life happen. You can’t build an end scene as beautiful as this by sitting on a couch.

Later, when I started learning about how to resolve a story, and when I began thinking about story as a guide for life, I took a lot of comfort in that principle. It wasn’t necessary to win for the story to be great, it was only necessary to sacrifice everything.

P.S. Please consider using the book links to purchase books from Amazon. Not only is Amazon usually more inexpensive but I also earn a measly referral fee. ;)

Every now and again, I read a book that I want to throw at everyone I know or at least a certain demographic of people I know. In this case, I want everyone I know who loves (truly loves) reading to read The Polysyllabic Spree. I’ve first heard about this book from my boss. He often sees me eating lunch with a book and we would exchange notes on what we’re reading. In a course of half a year, he’s mentioned “that book by Nick Hornby about reading” and stresses how I must read it as someone who loves to read. I’m familiar with Nick Hornby and know him as the author of About a Boy and High Fidelity. The final nudge to push me to action was an email correspondence with book worm, Vishy, who gave me the title of this collection of essays, The Polysyllabic Spree. What a lovely title!

Hornby wrote a monthly column in The Believer, a British periodical (newspaper? magazine? I don’t know and don’t really care) where he logged his reading experience. Each column started off with a two columned table, one titled “Books Bought,” and the other “Books Read.” He then detailed his experience of reading what he read, not reading what he bought, why he abandoned books mid-reading, why he bought what he bought, and so forth. The Polysyllabic Spree is a collection of these columns. As someone who is always interested in the motivations and neuroses that push us to make the decisions we make, this book satisfied the nosy voyeur in me.

Why I found The Polysyllabic Spree a must-read for readers is that he’s terribly hilarious and relatable. He read and analyzed classics without being pretentious. He was sometimes open and vulnerable, namely in talking about his autistic son. He is a proponent for reading in general and as far as I could tell, wasn’t a reading bigot. Also, you may find some curious reads to add to your to-read list.

Excerpts

I had to stop myself from sharing more excerpts. For such a tiny book, it was packed full with memorable passages.

What happens is that int he process of being raped, the central female character gets her nipple sliced off, and it really upset me. I mean, I know I was supposed to get upset. But I was bothered way beyond function. I was bothered to the extent that I struck up a conversation with the author at periodic intervals thereafter. “Did the nipple really have to go, Pete? Explain to me why. Couldn’t it have just…nearly gone? Or maybe you could have left it alone altogether? I mean come on, man. Her husband has just been brutally murdered. She’s been raped. We get the picture. Leave the nipple alone.

I have complained in this column before about how everyone wants to spoil plots of classics for you. OK, I should have read David Copperfield before, and therefore deserve to be punished. But even the snootiest critic/publisher/whatever must presumably accept that we must all, at some point, read a book for the first time. I know that the only thing brainy people do with their lives is reread great works of fiction, but surely even James Wood and Harold Bloom read before they reread? (Maybe not. Maybe they’ve only ever reread, and that’s what separates them from us. Hats off to them.)

I suddenly had a little epiphany: all the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal. My music is me, too, of course- but as I only really like rock and roll and its mutations, huge chunks of me – my rarely examined operatic streak, for example, are unrepresented in my CD collection. And I don’t have the wall space or the money for all the art I would want, and my house is a shabby mess, ruined by children.. But with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not. Maybe that’s not wort the thirty-odd quid I blew on those collections of letters, admittedly, but it’s got to be worth something, right?

Books are, let’s face it, better than everything else. If we played cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time. Go on, try it. The Magic Flute v. Middlemarch? Middlemarch in six. The Last Supper v. Crime and Punishment? Fyodor on points. See? I mean, I don’t know how scientific this is, but it feels like the novels are walking it. You might get the occasional exception….And every now and then you’d get a shock, because that happens in sport, so Back to the Future III might land a lucky punch on Rabbit, Run; but I’m still backing literature twenty-nine times out of thirty.

I’ve been trying to write a short story that entails my knowing something about contemporary theories of time-hence Introducing Time-but every time I pick up any kind of book about science I start to cry. This actually inhibits my reading pretty badly, due to not being able to see. I’m OK with time theorists up until, say, St. Augustine, and then I start to panic, and the panic then gives way to actual weeping. By my estimation, I should be able to understand Newton by the time I’m 850 years old-by which time I’ll probably discover that some smartass has invented a new theory, and he’s out of date anyway. The short story should be done some time shortly after that. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it, because it’s killing me.

On reading David Copperfield:

For the first time since I’ve been writing this column, the completion of a book has left me feeling bereft: I miss them all. Let’s face it: usually you’re just happy as hell to have chalked another one up on the board, but this last month I’ve been living in this hyperreal world, full of memorable, brilliantly eccentric people, and laughs (I hope you know how funny Dickens is), and proper bendy stories you want to follow. I suspect that it’ll be difficult to read a pared-down, stripped-back, skin-and-bones novel for a while.

 

 
P.S. Please consider using the book links to purchase books from Amazon. Not only is Amazon usually cheaper but I earn a measly referral fee. ;)

P.P.S. I reviewed another book by Hornby. Click here to read review of A Long Way Down.

Months ago, Brenda recommended that I read Bird by Bird. Recently, I came across the book as I was browsing the library and was all to happy to try it out. A guide to writing, Bird by Bird read a little like a humorous and neurotic (in a charming way) memoir and was such an addictive read.

Ann Lamott provided a very nurturing guide. She coddled the aspiring writer with pretty obvious writing advice. Keep writing. Don’t write to be published, write to write. Get it all out and screw getting it perfect the first few time. She also rallied to not force your plot on your characters. Get to know the characters as they develop through writing, and if the plot doesn’t suit their way of life or personalities, ditch the plot and let the characters lead and navigate the story. I thought this “get to know your characters” approach very liberating and whimsical and it made me want to try writing fiction. In the end, the fact that she made me laugh out loud with her personal anecdotes, appreciate how versatile gardens are as metaphors, (I already turned in the library book or I’d share that excerpt on gardens with you), and made me consider writing fiction just for the sake of writing, has made this book one of my favorite books this year.

I can’t say enough how Bird by Bird was an enjoyable read, even for those who don’t write creatively. There was one piece of advice that spoke to me. I thought it was great general life advice regarding those frenemies who are prone to schadenfreude. Her advice is simply to be rid of them.

I don’t think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won’t be good enough at it, and I don’t think you have time to waste on someone who does not respond to you with kindness and respect. You don’t want to spend your time around people who make you hold your breath. You can’t fill up when you’re holding you breath. And writing is about filling up, filling up when you are empty, letting images and ideas and smells run down like water – just as writing is also about dealing with the emptiness. The emptiness destroys enough writers without the help of some friend or spouse.

More Excerpts

“Novels ought to have hope; at least, American novels ought to have hope. French novels don’t need to. We mostly win wars, they lose them. Of course, they did hide more Jews than many other countries, and this is a form of winning.”

“You avoid forcing your characters to march too steadily to the drumbeat of your artistic purpose. You leave some measure of real freedom for your characters to be themselves. And if minor characters show an inclination to become major characters, as they’re apt to do, you at least give them a shot at it, because in the world of fiction it may take many pages before you find out who the major characters really are, just as in the real world it may take you many years to find out that the stranger you talked to once for half an hour in the railroad station may have done more to point you to where your true homeland lies than your priest or your bet friend or even your psychiatrist.”

Recommended Reading:

Two years ago, I read Stephen King’s On Writing and loved it. Also a guide on writing and memoir.

When I browsed the reviews on Husbands and Wives Club (Amazon affiliate link), I felt a little protective when I read the criticism. Namely, it was too technical and detached and had too much theory and highlights of therapy methods. “Too much psychobabble, not enough narrative,” I think I read somewhere on Goodreads.com. The author is a journalist following a marriage therapy group for a year and documenting the observations and supporting her real observations with theories. It is not a memoir nor it is it a novel. If I came in expecting a novel, I would be disappointed too. Though Abraham was privy to very intimate marital details of the five couples she observed in therapy, it is still just a small window. The book entices the voyeur in you but does not satisfy it. Her role is that of an observer and an occasional active participant, the scope of her experience is limited.

I read this book as it was intended. A piece of nonfiction questioning and exploring the benefits and value of group therapy through the lens of a journalist (not a psychologist), who was granted a seat for a year in a therapy group consisting of five couples. The way psychology is presented in this book fascinates me. Pages of theory are interlaced with the very real problems experienced by five couples ranging from sexual dysfunction, homosexuality, complacency, childhood traumas, and infertility. I very much enjoyed the layman’s perspective. I can sense the author’s curiosity and the due diligence she practiced as an observer and researcher.

I recommend this book if you think you would enjoy a hybrid of nonfiction and fiction. It’s a light dose of technical writing and a light dose of narrative. Per usual, some excerpts I pulled out while reading can be found below.

We didn’t joke [her problem] away, we didn’t tell stories to get away from it. We allowed the moment to happen. Now it’s not magical, and she’s not going to leave here and her marriage will be fantastic. But this is what intimacy is – it’s allowing the truth between people to happen, in a way that’s helpful rather than terrifying.

Clem is exhibiting the stickiness of the negative emotional and behavioral loops marital researchers have observed. Or, in the words of therapist Michael Miller, who’s never seen the inside of a lab: “Much of the unchanging character of distrubed, anxiety-ridden intimacy comes from the reduced perceptions each person has of t he other. At the beginning, these projections, as psychologists call them, tend to result in overly idealized images of each other; later intimate partners are likely to take a paranoid reading of the other’s motives and dwell on the worst episodes in their history together, which exacerbates their freezing each other into negative snapshots.”

“Many jobs – like many marriages – don’t consistently provide the “wows,” she says, “but they do provide the whys and wherefores: I’m doing this for a reason, my children know I’, doing this for a reason.” For the existentialist psychologist, the cultivation of meaning is the foundation for living. “you’re all struggling with some individual preference that can be hard to mesh with being married. And there needs to be a way for you to feel you’re not giving yourself up by remaining in the relationship.”

“Anger can be your friend…” “Anger lets you know when something is not correct,” Marie tells Michael. “It’s your body’s way of saying things are not right,” Coche piles on. Feelings, including anger, are harmless in and of themselves; it’s disconnected from your negative feelings as you have, anger is in charge of you. It disconnects you from yourself; it puts a smile on your face. It leads you to do things that aren’t good for your wife.”

“The biggest truth to face now – what is probably making me unfunny now for the remainder of my life – is that I don’t think people give a damn whether the planet goes on or not. It seems to me as if everyone is living as members of Alcoholics Anonymous do, day by day. And a few more days will be enough. I know of very little people who are dreaming of a world for their grandchildren.”

“Do you realize that all great literature – Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, A Farewell to Arms, The Scarlet Letter, The Red Badge of Courage, The Iliad and The Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, The Bible, and “The Charge of the Light Brigade” – are all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? (Isn’t it such a relief to have somebody say that?”

“If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”

“Speaking of plunging into war, do you know why I think George W. Bush is so pissed off at Arabs? They brought us algebra. Also the numbers we use, including a symbol for nothing, which Europeans had never had before. You think Arabs are dumb? Try doing long division with Roman numerals.”

“But I replied that what made being alive almost worthwhile for me, besides music, was all the saints I met, who could be anywhere. By saints I meant people who behaved decently in a strikingly indecent society.”

“… his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’

So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grand kids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’”

If reading this book wasn’t nice, I don’t know what is.