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rushthatspeaksRead August 4th.
After being pleasantly surprised by Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love, a book which has been fundamentally misrepresented by the forces which made it into a bestseller and a bad Julia Roberts movie, I decided it was worth seeing if her second would also be better than one expects of A Bestselling Memoir, Subtype: Vaguely Inspirational.
And it is. Gilbert and her lover, who had both gone through nasty divorces, were cohabiting cheerfully enough in a bi-continental relationship sustained by her lover's ninety-day work visas. The U.S. government does not like people to do this indefinitely, and deported him. (She says that the legal word is not deportation, but that no one has ever been able to tell her a different word that would cover it.) This meant they needed to get married if he ever wanted to be able to go back to the U.S., a country in which he had substantial business interests, and out of which she did not want to move permanently.
So, facing what registered emotionally as a governmentally-sponsored shotgun wedding, she decided to do a whole bunch of research about marriage, past, present, and future, and see if she could shake her persistent divorce-caused phobia.
The thing I appreciate about Gilbert's writing here is that it has the same strength her last book had: she admits cheerfully that she is not qualified. She is not a historian, she is specifically not a historian specializing in matrimony, she will give you the names of the books she read and you have her permission to fault her research methods all you like, because this is not an academic text. This is the author, specifically, as a private person, trying to cope with marriage, the public institution, and using anything she can find to help herself do it. She also cheerfully admits that the things that frighten her and interest her about marriage, and the method she finally found to reconcile herself to it, are totally individual and almost certainly do not apply to anyone else. And when she stumbles across giant questions, as, of course, she does every other second, she does not claim to answer them for anyone but her, and sometimes she doesn't have answers for herself either.
So if you're looking for answers to those questions-- you know, the ones like 'why should I, personally, get married?' or 'what role does the patriarchy play in how I view the involvement of the state in marriage?' or 'why in the name of Margaret Sanger do people try so hard to defend something called 'traditional marriage' as an institution when as far as anyone can tell it is less than a century old?', well, this book is specifically not about answering that. It does, however, bring up those questions, and it's a pretty comprehensive list of questions, especially for female-gendered persons who have significant qualms about financial and personal autonomy (qualms which are statistically totally justified and worth consideration).
Gilbert ranges over her own past, the lives of women she knows, and the lives of her extended family in her attempt at reconciliation. Marriage for her is not only undesirable at the start of this book, but a force intruding where it doesn't belong, a symbol of people telling her and her partner that they have to do xyz or they cannot be socially acceptable. She always knows she will do it: she really doesn't want her lover to lose his business, she really doesn't want to move to Australia. What she needs to figure out is how to do it and maintain her self-respect, so that she doesn't feel like they've sold out, and so the whole thing doesn't damage their relationship.
And I have a lot of sympathy for that. That's a real problem, because it does sometimes feel as though when you get married they send you a list of Things People Assume About You Now in the mail (actually, they do, if you are female it begins with the shape of your name on the envelopes) -- and I'm in a same-sex marriage, where theoretically one would think it might be harder for people to make that list. I mean, I'm all for marriage, I desperately want my rights about it and I got married at eighteen and I'm delighted, but I look at the state of marriage as a civil contract every so often and boggle, you know? She is right to fear the things she fears.
So this book doesn't have much in the way of structure, in some ways, because she's wandering from theme to theme and coping strategy to coping strategy (and physically all over Southeast Asia doing miles and miles of paperwork), but I don't see that as a flaw, because this is not a tidy narrative she's in, here. The point is that she doesn't want it to be a tidy little narrative. And there's a fair bit that's funny in it, and a fair bit I sympathize with (I completely understand her total inability, after having gone through said mountains of paperwork, to be okay with the concept of having to organize anything at all by way of a wedding ceremony). The problems with the book are, of course, that she isn't a historian. There are always those moments where, if this is a field one reads in, it could have gone a little deeper. There is the urge to send her a list of further secondary sources. And there is the urge to suggest that she not try to make mental models of the state of marriage in, say, Vietnam, even if she is standing in Vietnam, because she doesn't speak the language and is there for like a month and is operating from a position of very well-meaning and privileged ignorance. Fortunately there is not very much of that. Also, there is a turn of phrase once which annoys me somewhat, in which she says that she thinks that just about everybody attempts some kind of deeply intimate monogamous bonding at some point whether it is sexual or not, and I'm like, no, I have never ever tried to be monogamous and neither have lots of people I know and it does not affect the intimacy of my bonding; you don't know very many poly people, do you, O Author.
But overall, this continues the theme: Elizabeth Gilbert, Better Books Than I Expected. Which is a good thing, and I'll take it.
After being pleasantly surprised by Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love, a book which has been fundamentally misrepresented by the forces which made it into a bestseller and a bad Julia Roberts movie, I decided it was worth seeing if her second would also be better than one expects of A Bestselling Memoir, Subtype: Vaguely Inspirational.
And it is. Gilbert and her lover, who had both gone through nasty divorces, were cohabiting cheerfully enough in a bi-continental relationship sustained by her lover's ninety-day work visas. The U.S. government does not like people to do this indefinitely, and deported him. (She says that the legal word is not deportation, but that no one has ever been able to tell her a different word that would cover it.) This meant they needed to get married if he ever wanted to be able to go back to the U.S., a country in which he had substantial business interests, and out of which she did not want to move permanently.
So, facing what registered emotionally as a governmentally-sponsored shotgun wedding, she decided to do a whole bunch of research about marriage, past, present, and future, and see if she could shake her persistent divorce-caused phobia.
The thing I appreciate about Gilbert's writing here is that it has the same strength her last book had: she admits cheerfully that she is not qualified. She is not a historian, she is specifically not a historian specializing in matrimony, she will give you the names of the books she read and you have her permission to fault her research methods all you like, because this is not an academic text. This is the author, specifically, as a private person, trying to cope with marriage, the public institution, and using anything she can find to help herself do it. She also cheerfully admits that the things that frighten her and interest her about marriage, and the method she finally found to reconcile herself to it, are totally individual and almost certainly do not apply to anyone else. And when she stumbles across giant questions, as, of course, she does every other second, she does not claim to answer them for anyone but her, and sometimes she doesn't have answers for herself either.
So if you're looking for answers to those questions-- you know, the ones like 'why should I, personally, get married?' or 'what role does the patriarchy play in how I view the involvement of the state in marriage?' or 'why in the name of Margaret Sanger do people try so hard to defend something called 'traditional marriage' as an institution when as far as anyone can tell it is less than a century old?', well, this book is specifically not about answering that. It does, however, bring up those questions, and it's a pretty comprehensive list of questions, especially for female-gendered persons who have significant qualms about financial and personal autonomy (qualms which are statistically totally justified and worth consideration).
Gilbert ranges over her own past, the lives of women she knows, and the lives of her extended family in her attempt at reconciliation. Marriage for her is not only undesirable at the start of this book, but a force intruding where it doesn't belong, a symbol of people telling her and her partner that they have to do xyz or they cannot be socially acceptable. She always knows she will do it: she really doesn't want her lover to lose his business, she really doesn't want to move to Australia. What she needs to figure out is how to do it and maintain her self-respect, so that she doesn't feel like they've sold out, and so the whole thing doesn't damage their relationship.
And I have a lot of sympathy for that. That's a real problem, because it does sometimes feel as though when you get married they send you a list of Things People Assume About You Now in the mail (actually, they do, if you are female it begins with the shape of your name on the envelopes) -- and I'm in a same-sex marriage, where theoretically one would think it might be harder for people to make that list. I mean, I'm all for marriage, I desperately want my rights about it and I got married at eighteen and I'm delighted, but I look at the state of marriage as a civil contract every so often and boggle, you know? She is right to fear the things she fears.
So this book doesn't have much in the way of structure, in some ways, because she's wandering from theme to theme and coping strategy to coping strategy (and physically all over Southeast Asia doing miles and miles of paperwork), but I don't see that as a flaw, because this is not a tidy narrative she's in, here. The point is that she doesn't want it to be a tidy little narrative. And there's a fair bit that's funny in it, and a fair bit I sympathize with (I completely understand her total inability, after having gone through said mountains of paperwork, to be okay with the concept of having to organize anything at all by way of a wedding ceremony). The problems with the book are, of course, that she isn't a historian. There are always those moments where, if this is a field one reads in, it could have gone a little deeper. There is the urge to send her a list of further secondary sources. And there is the urge to suggest that she not try to make mental models of the state of marriage in, say, Vietnam, even if she is standing in Vietnam, because she doesn't speak the language and is there for like a month and is operating from a position of very well-meaning and privileged ignorance. Fortunately there is not very much of that. Also, there is a turn of phrase once which annoys me somewhat, in which she says that she thinks that just about everybody attempts some kind of deeply intimate monogamous bonding at some point whether it is sexual or not, and I'm like, no, I have never ever tried to be monogamous and neither have lots of people I know and it does not affect the intimacy of my bonding; you don't know very many poly people, do you, O Author.
But overall, this continues the theme: Elizabeth Gilbert, Better Books Than I Expected. Which is a good thing, and I'll take it.
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no subject
Date: 2011-08-08 07:58 pm (UTC)<3
I like Gilbert a whole lot less than you do, but I like your way of reading and thinking about her books.
Hanne Blank has a book coming out (you almost CERTAINLY know this, I am just bringing it up because of the topic) which has a lot to say about defending "traditional" marriage: Straight. It is really good.
if you are female it begins with the shape of your name on the envelopes
I always knew I wanted to keep my "maiden" (haha) name, and my partner never had a problem with that, but I am BOGGLED, still, by the number of people who think that because we have different last names, we are not married. Even when we are both wearing the rings! Apartment realtors, government officials, employers, &c &c. (Have had to actually produce the marriage certificate several times, or at least a photocopy of it.) And I'm always just like, this is the twenty-first century, why are we still having this conversation?
It is also a little boggling how many people assume because I married a guy I am, have been and forever will be 100% straight, but that comes up a lot less often than the name thing.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-08 11:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-08 12:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-08 04:55 pm (UTC)I'm not sure what you mean by 'having your cake and eating it too', but the way I think about it is that if marriage is a commitment you make to spend your life with someone, you and the person(s) you marry get to decide what that means, and there are all kinds of ways you can be faithful to someone.
Not everyone wants or needs sexual exclusivity in their relationships. So you can have a relationship where you both want monogamy, and being faithful involves being monogamous. Or you can have a relationship with someone and be okay with you and/or your partner having casual hookups but not serious relationships outside of your marriage, or you can have a relationship where threesomes are okay, but sleeping with other people without your partner present is not. Or there are two (or more) people to whom you want to spend the rest of your life, and they to you and to each other. And so on. So what's important is that everyone in the relationship is comfortable with how you define being faithful and committed to the relationship.
And when you have a relationship where one person wants things that their partner isn't comfortable with, be it non-monogamy in general, dating other people verses casual hookups, certain kinks, or whatever, then the people involved need to decide if a) giving up the things they want/need is worth it to be with their partner on the one side, b) dealing with being jealous/uncomfortable with what your partner is doing is worth being with them on the other, or c) they should break up because their relationship needs are incompatible.
Monogamy only works when its what both people want and need. So does poly.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-08 05:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-08 07:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-08 10:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-08 06:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-08 07:07 pm (UTC)