A profoundly moving story about Love

Brava to dear Elizabeth Gilbert for her beautifully written and recorded memoir about love, divorce, career,spirituality,family and different cultural observations. I have penned two autobiographies and also recorded an audiobook on Audible after enjoying an amazing international career in music, and also went through marriage and divorce , so I obviously related to many of her experiences on a personal level, but believe many readers men or women who have not had such blessings and recognition will relate too. Please excuse if this writing is filled with mistakes as I am dictating and finding it hard to correct! I am recommending Elizabeth’s book to all my friends. Liona Boyd

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Right on Time

I started listening to this book exactly when I needed to hear it. I resonate so strongly with her struggles and it was truly helpful to hear.

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Read before getting married hehe

Loved it and all the history of civil and religious unions. What it means to different cultures and how we marry for love in canada… it’s all about love.

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Interesting and informative

Good combination of storytelling and fact sharing, worth the credit. Didn't love the narration, but was authentic as it was told in her own voice.

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Adequate performance, content not for me

I raged a lot while reading this book because of its limp spaghetti noodle structure, the cynicism and negativity throughout, and the western superiority that the author exhibits while visiting small villages in South America. I don’t know if the author is white, but that’s the vibe that I get.

The topic of this book is interesting, however the purpose, structure, and execution could have been more precise. I had a hard time following the former two, and would have preferred more order; I never knew when a chapter was ending and couldn’t anticipate where the next chapter would start, the flow was like a scattered thought. The narration was good.

The book is quite cynical, and will leave the reader questioning whether marriage is worth it. I enjoy this thought experiment. I enjoy positive and uplifting books, verging on spirituality, so for me personally, this book felt very low vibrational. You can tell she just absolutely did not want to get married, I can feel her dragging her feet, right up to the end. There wasn’t a big cathartic decision or moment of divine intervention; she did her research and bided her time until the wedding date came around, and then just got married. Anticlimactic.

I would have preferred the author be more self aware of her own feelings of superiority, especially in terms of comparing the lives of the kind indigenous people who let her (a stranger) into their homes to ask intrusive questions, to her own self-identified “privileged life” (read: a life with an unrelenting, overhanging feeling of romantic malaise and doom - but hey, with a college degree and a passport!). For me, there were too many repeated mentions of their poverty, dirt floors, cuisine, lack of opportunity, etc. I really felt like an accomplice in western superiority listening to the audiobook. Just because they live a different lifestyle and/or don’t have what the author has does not make them open to pity, condescension, and judgment. I hope that the families receive a percentage of profits from this book, as their life stories, culture, and way of life take up a good amount of room in the book, AND because the author pointed out sooo many times how poor and disadvantaged they were. The husband who had the frog business and pregnant wife, for example, had big plans once he ran into some money. I hope their contributions to the book were compensated fairly, from the financial standards of a North American.

Furthermore, the author’s entire point of this book is that happiness in love escapes her and she fears marriage because happiness may escape her once more and she will have another awful divorce. That’s why she hunts down the history of marriage, that’s why she’s in these villages interviewing people - it’s all to figure out how to make her imminent marriage successful. So she goes into these villages and finds people who don’t center all of their happiness on finding and keeping a man, and then pities them because they don’t have the same opportunities or freedom as she. She wants to “wrap their house in gauze and protect it from harsh modernity” (paternalistic energy; they are not ignorant babies, unaware of the harshness of life). They have the one thing that she wants in this world - happiness - and she still focuses on what they don’t have.

The author also makes many assumptions into what the indigenous people are feeling, which I just think is like living in a fantasy world. Things left unsaid can’t be assumed, especially across cultures, but the author weaves what she thinks people are feeling into her narrative to make her and her fiancé seem more well received by the families and to neatly fit the answers of the villagers into what she already decided their encounter to mean. She assigns meaning where there may be none to fit her narrative. The assumption is what kills me.

I also would have preferred more thorough citation to references for data, although listening to an audiobook may be more to blame than the author’s willy nilly cherry-picking of data (which was my perception while reading). It would be interesting to see a peer review of the data that she quoted, just to see if my perception is true or if I am being distrustful.

Final thoughts: interesting topic, could have been better executed, more self reflection needed especially when casting quick judgment onto indigenous peoples and the customs and traditions that make them happy (even when it’s frog eating, the author made her thoughts abundantly clear). I would only recommend this book to someone with a very critical mind, reading the book without taking anything as truth. I think someone studying women’s studies could benefit from doing a critical examination of this book as I see some problematic threads running throughout.

I am not an author though, so please take this review with a grain of salt!

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