Eat, Pray, Be Married?

Is Elizabeth Gilbert suffering from the curse of the sequel? Gilbert, author of bestselling travelogue Eat, Pray, Love, has been long at work on a much-anticipated followup. She scrapped a 500-page manuscript, loosely titled Weddings and Evictions, in 2008. She was suffering, she now tells The New York Times, from “an Eat, Pray, Love hangover.” Her new book, however, may be just the medicine she needs. It’s entitled Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage, and centers around the 18 months following Eat, Pray, Love. It chronicles her experience marrying the man she meets in Indonesia, even though she vowed never to remarry. “It is and isn’t a sequel,” Gilbert says. And while her first book drew entirely from Gilbert’s emotions, in Committed she takes a more scientific approach: She has interviewed family and friends to present an “academic contemplation” about marriage. Gilbert’s publisher, Viking, has announced an initial circulation of one million copies in hardcover, which may suggest it has lower expectations for the followup. “I was scared that all the people who loved Eat, Pray, Love might not want to read that new voice,” Gilbert said. “But I knew that if I didn’t do it that way it would just be a lousy book.”