Last week i finished up a little book called The Gastronomy of Marriage by Michelle Maisto. I thought it sounded intriguing because it’s about a couple who are planning their wedding and enjoy cooking together, much like me and Nathan. Yeah, it’s a memoir and i don’t much like memoirs, i reasoned, but i enjoyed Committed so maybe i’ll enjoy this, too.
I didn’t.
I hope to never again read a book about being a writer. Every writer has to write about being a writer and i find it terribly boring. People who make documentaries rarely pepper their films with coverage of what it’s like to be a filmmaker – hell, people don’t often make films about their own lives at all. But the Memoir is this genre of books where writers write about their ordinary writer lives and try to paint them as being interesting somehow and it’s just… boring.
Anyway. About the book. It’s mercifully short and padded with recipes, which i thought was a nice touch since most of the book is a description of cooking this or that meal. Maisto attempts to use these meals as an illustration of a transformation she undergoes while being engaged, but there is absolutely no soul to the book. She describes starting to resent cooking when it becomes her “job” in the house. Her mother – mercilessly – always told Michelle that marrying her father and becoming a housewife was a mistake, and Maisto seems to be deathly afraid of repeating her mother’s mistakes (just like every other feminist i’ve been reading lately). But in the end she realizes that she has always loved cooking and still does and is not in fact being oppressed because she finds herself in the kitchen on a daily basis. Duh.
There’s just no passion in the writing. And her fiance sounds like a royal pain in the ass, by the way. Not that Maisto complains about him, ever. She doesn’t seem to actually realize that he is, in fact, a pain in the ass. There’s no humor in the book, nothing really sentimental or moving is said, and i took nothing away from it except for a reinforced notion that young women are actually afraid of doing more than fifty percent of the housework now for any reason, even if they enjoy it. She doesn’t have a meal planned. She throws out a few ideas. Her fiance whines. They finally settle on something. She cooks. They eat and are satisfied. This happens repeatedly, and this is pretty much all that happens. And the story ends days before the wedding. I DIDN’T EVEN GET TO HEAR ABOUT THE WEDDING. The only aspect of wedding planning she seems to enjoy is choosing the food; even her description of dress shopping is excruciatingly dull. I mean, come on – this is your wedding. Have a little fun, for God’s sake.
My dear friend Kelly gave me a copy of Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress by Susan Gilman for my birthday, and earlier this week i finally finished it. The subtitle of the book is Tales of Growing Up Groovy and Clueless; it’s a series of stories that span Gilman’s life from her earliest memories to her early adulthood in the ’90s. She’s a feminist Jew who grew up in New York, went to college to become a writer, suffered the divorce of her parents as an adult and wound up in D.C. after a stint working for a Congresswoman on Capitol Hill. I found all of the stories to be entertaining, but the one that gives the book its title was – of course – the most interesting one in my mind.
What it refers to, perhaps obviously, is a wedding dress. When Gilman and her fiancé become engaged, they decide to buck tradition and do things their own way. By and by they find that even if all you want is a DJ and a few guests you still have to have a place to put them and something to feed them, and in spite of themselves they become absorbed in the process of planning the whole affair. But the one thing Susan absolutely won’t have is the traditional wedding dress. As a feminist, she protested Fashion Week in college and wore clothes of a unique punk/vintage style, avoiding conformity to gender roles and societal expectations. Why dress up like some sort of storybook fantasy character to begin a life with a man who has to love you for who you are at your least glamorous? Marriage is a very real, quotidian thing and shouldn’t be treated as though it were some fairy tale. “Let’s face it. I’m neither royalty nor a virgin,” Gilman writes. “In a traditional wedding gown, I’d just be a hypocrite in a pouffy white dress.”
But at her friends’ urging, Gilman goes to a bridal shop and tries on a few dresses just in case. What she finds is a dress that makes her feel gorgeous and a whole new perspective on fashion’s role in feminism. She writes:
Every woman should have this experience – and not only if or when she gets married. Every woman should see herself looking uniquely breathtaking in something tailored to celebrate her body, so that she is better able to appreciate her own beauty and better equipped to withstand the ideals of our narrow-waisted, narrow-minded culture.
At the beginning of the chapter i felt like a bad feminist for not sharing her total aversion to all things traditional in the realm of marriage, but by this paragraph i felt vindicated.
I noticed that Gilman had the same sort of attitude toward marriage that Elizabeth Gilbert expressed in Committed, which is this general feeling of disgust with the idea of becoming legally married despite her devotion to her partner. Both women are feminists and feel that marriage is in many ways not good for a woman, partly because she has to sacrifice her ambitions in order to play the role of “wife.”
I’m not really sure what to think of this. My first reaction was to think that these women, along with a lot of other young people i’ve heard express this same view lately, are perhaps just making excuses to cover up the fact that they really aren’t willing to commit 100%. The way i see it, if you’ve already pledged loyalty to your partner, then you stand to lose nothing and gain a few pretty important benefits by getting married. So why do these women feel the need to reason with themselves that marriage is really some sort of rebellion in order to make peace with walking down the aisle? Are they really just that concerned about filling trite, stereotypical gender roles that they let their lives be governed by that fear? Or is a writing career truly hindered somehow by the duties of being a wife? Personally, i think it’s raising children that’s the huge sacrifice, not getting married.
Your thoughts? I’ve re-written the latter half of this post several times now, and i’ve decided to just end it here with a couple of questions and one unsupported statement rather than try to explain myself. The topic is just too vast; i could do a lot of research and write a very large paper on the topic of Whether Marriage is Good For Women. I suppose i shouldn’t criticize anyone for stepping back and really asking themselves if getting married is the right thing for them to do. But i think when the time is right, the answer has to be a very clear and confident YES. Single ladies: do your deliberating now.
or, as i like to call it, The Benefits of being Rich and Having No Children.
Despite all the buzz that’s been filling the media of all sorts for years about Eat, Pray, Love, i never had any interest in the book solely because of that ominous middle word, pray. A book like this is meant for entertainment and when you see the world one way and the author sees it another, it’s just hard to get anything out of it. However, having read and enjoyed the sequel Committed (which contained very little mention of religion or spirituality) and seeing that the movie was set to come out on my birthday, i decided to give Eat, Pray, Love a shot anyway.
First of all, i was hoping to learn more about why Elizabeth Gilbert decided to leave her marriage. The book does a good job of illustrating how completely incapacitated she was by the unhappiness she felt with her marriage and suggests that there was definitely a very good reason for all that misery, but fails to actually disclose what exactly the problem was. Gilbert says the reasons are “too sad and too personal” to write about, and so she doesn’t. And so i still can’t feel for her at all.
Here’s my problem with this: she chose to write this book. She disclosed a lot of personal stuff in the book (like the page about masturbation that made me want to go bury my head deep in a sand dune). She didn’t want to tell her ex-husband’s secrets, but he hates her anyway so why not go ahead and write about it and maybe help someone else’s marriage in so doing? Her divorce made her miserable, which made her have to go on a spiritual journey, which ended when she forgave herself for destroying her marriage. I see some sort of animal eating its own tail here. And the weirdest part is that she ends up getting married again. I’m sure that all of this is more complicated than i’m making it out to be and i definitely agree that marriages just need to end sometimes, but Elizabeth Gilbert has told me everything about these five years of her life except for what sparked it all and i’m left just wishing to know WHY.
Whatever it was that happened, it made her decide to pursue pleasure, spirituality, and a balance between the two. So she goes to Italy and that’s all fun and good. And then she goes to India and subjects herself to little sleep, little social interaction, a lot of hard work and a ton of chanting and meditation. This is the part i couldn’t relate to at all. Except maybe the beginning of it when she’s all whiny about the whole thing, ’cause that’s what i would feel like, too, in a place like that. But then it gets pretty mystical and i couldn’t help thinking “of course you’re going to start seeing electric snakes and stuff when you do that sort of thing to your brain.”
By the way – i’m going to excuse myself if i’ve used tenses incorrectly here because this is a blog and nobody is paying me for it, but Elizabeth Gilbert bounces from one tense to another in this book with a truly distracting frequency that to me just makes no sense. I think someone needs to go back and edit it one more time.
In Bali she meets a lot of interesting people and falls in love and seems to be a normal person again. Elizabeth Gilbert certainly is good at making friends with people, and i can imagine that traveling the world eating delicious food and talking to interesting people would be pretty great. I didn’t get the whole spiritual bit though, and i think the book was hyped way beyond its actual value. Overall, i’d say it was an okay book.
I did go see the movie on my birthday, and i thought the beginning where she just up and leaves her husband was even sadder on screen than in the book. I felt really sorry for her ex-husband. The spirituality was down-played and some plot elements were added for effect, but i think for the most part the movie was true to the story and, much like the book, all-in-all it was pretty alright. Save your $5.50-9 and get it at the Red Box some day.
When i first heard about Elizabeth Gilbert‘s new book Committed i was instantly intrigued, despite the fact that the mere title of her enormous bestseller Eat, Pray, Love has always prevented me from having the least bit of interest in reading it. The new book was described as a sort of sequel to Eat, Pray, Love, taking up where that memoir left off: with Gilbert getting ready to marry for a second time, even though the globe-spanning travels that inspired the first book were themselves prompted by an ugly divorce. The sub-title is, “A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage.” I used to consider myself a pretty big skeptic of marriage, and the review i read also mentioned that the book included a lot of facts and history on the subject of matrimony, so i put myself on the book’s queue at the Des Moines Public Library right away. I was number 36 on the list.
I waited on that list for at least four months, and i tore through the book in a week and a half once it finally became available to me (about a week and a half ago). Although the citations of her resources are vague at best, Gilbert provides a wealth of information about marriage, so the book reads more like a non-fiction than a memoir (YES, i know memoirs are included in non-fiction, but you know what i mean). I told Nathan that if i were ever to write a book, it might be like this one; a lot of vaguely-cited facts, some probably-less-than-accurate yet educated conclusions drawn from those facts, a few not-too-detailed anecdotes, and a lot of musing.
I loved the book. I’m not a huge fan of modern-day memoirs because frankly i don’t find other people’s lives to be as interesting as they do, generally speaking. But this book is different; it’s more like looking inside Gilbert’s mind as she researches and ponders the topic of marriage and gradually finds a way of looking at it that makes her feel comfortable with getting married again. She isn’t a psychologist or an anthropologist or an expert on (or at) marriage, but she apologizes for all that and the book is what it is. One thing she is certainly good at is getting people of very interesting walks of life to talk about any given topic, and the conversations she has with people in far-away places about marriage are fascinating. She also includes a section about not having babies, and i was particularly interested in what her mommy friends had to say both for and against having children. Some were surprised by how much happiness having children brought them while others told Gilbert that it wasn’t really worth it even though they love their children dearly. And then there are the facts: that even though people think the childless will die alone and miserable, the happiness of people polled at the end of life is not dependent upon whether or not they have children. I found that fact encouraging, and i enjoyed Gilbert’s praises for “The Auntie Brigade.” There are a lot of us childless aunties out there, and we’re important.
The one thing i thought was lacking in this book was a little more intimacy. Gilbert doesn’t go into a lot of detail about her relationships, particularly the one that ended in a nasty, devastating, ugly divorce. What went wrong there, one wonders? One would think that a person who is so skeptical of marriage on account of having been the victim of divorce would analyze that failure thoroughly in her search for peace. The only concrete thing she says about it is that he wanted babies and she didn’t, and that she was twenty-five when they got married. She says that last bit as though it were explanation enough for why the marriage failed. Uh, excuse me?! You really need to clear that one up for me, Elizabeth!
The book is supposed to be a memoir, and it’s ultimately about Elizabeth Gilbert’s search for reassurance that getting married is the right thing for her to do. Personally, i was left biting my lip for her a little bit, because the conclusion she reaches is wobbly at best. She hasn’t analyzed her first marriage and deep down she seems to still hate the whole idea of marriage. It seems to me that in the end she just put a fresh coat of paint on a rotten attitude. But – that’s her problem, i suppose. Maybe this book just doesn’t quite convey the full extent of her mindset. Either way, i really enjoyed the majority of what she had to say.
I don’t think the book really changed my mind about marriage at all – i was already a cautious fan, by which i mean i don’t think marriage is for everyone but i’m pretty sure it’s for me – but it certainly made me think about a few things and informed me of some cool tidbits. Like, for instance, the fact that (statistically speaking) age 25 is the dividing line between marriages that are pretty likely to fail and those that endure. I’ll be 25 and Nathan will be 26 when we get married, so we’re sort of squeaking past that line. We’ve also got the advantages of: being of the same age, ethnicity, economic class and education level; not wanting babies; and having similar jobs. Our disadvantages are: not being strongly religious and not having a huge network of friends.
So, let’s hang out more, okay?
I just finished my fourth book of the year (and no, i’m not reading at the same clip i was last year, but hey – i’m reading): The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God and i want to recommend it to everyone. It’s a kind of response by Carl Sagan to William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, which is a famous old book that i have not in fact read.
This is not a militant atheist manifesto like The End of Faith or God is not Great. If you’ve ever watched The Cosmos, it reads more like a few episodes of that. In fact, it contains some of the same content. If you have not watched The Cosmos, you really ought to. You can stream it on Netflix or Hulu and it’s educational (if occasionally outdated) and fantastic. It’s not about God, it’s about – you guessed it. If you’re unfamiliar with Carl Sagan entirely, he’s also the guy who wrote Contact. I didn’t understand the flick as a kid but man, do i appreciate it now. Ok – watch this, this is a sweet song composed of auto-tuned clips of Carl Sagan:
He was a brilliant scientist who was extremely passionate about astrophysics and the possibility of life beyond Earth. This particular book was published by his widow Ann Druyan after his death, and it’s actually a transcription of a lecture series he gave on how the idea of God fits in with the scientific perspective. It’s really thought-provoking, and it makes you feel like you’re auditing a fascinating course at an Ivy League school for free. There are even visuals and Q&A sessions included. Almost makes me want to go back to school… 
Reading this book, i saw a lot of the same ideas that Dawkins likes to talk about, but i think here they’re presented in a more approachable and open-minded manner. I don’t know why they decided to make The God Delusion blindingly shiny-metallic/day-glo orange considering that nobody wants to be seen reading it in the first place. But if you’re even the least bit curious about how anyone could be passionate about the fact that there is no scientific evidence for the existence of God, nobody will sneer at you if they see you with your nose buried in this one.