Committed - An Excerpt

Having greatly enjoyed Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love, I couldn't wait to read her new work Committed. Part memoir, part reflection on the state of marriage, Committed is not the book I would ever have written about marriage, but I'm finding it intriguing nonetheless.

"And now that memory - that sound - swam through me, too. I even felt as though I could remember it, despite having never met Felipe's father, who died years ago. In fact, there are probably only about four people alive in the whole world who remember Felipe's father at all anymore, and only one of them - until the moment Felipe shared this story with me - recalled exactly how that man had looked and sounded when he used to swim across wide Brazilian rivers in the middle years of the last century. But now I felt that I could remember it, too, in a strange and personal way.

This is intimacy: the trading of stories in the dark.

This act, the act of quiet nighttime talking, illustrates for me more than anything else the curious alchemy of companionship. Because when Felipe described his father's swimming stroke, I took that watery image and I stitched it carefully into the hem of my own life, and now I will carry that around with me forever. As long as I live, and even long after Felipe has gone, his childhood memory, his father, his river, his Brazil - all of this, too, has somehow become me." p239