marriage
Commitment
Elizabeth Gilbert shot to fame with her autobiographical book Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything, a runaway success following its publication in 2006. It tells the story of her travels across continents searching for meaning in life – spiritual and personal – following her divorce after eight years of marriage. It ends with her falling in love with a Brazilian-born Australian citizen, Felipe. The story was made into a major film of the same title starring Julia Roberts and Javier Bardem released in 2010.
Committed: A Love Story (published in 2010) picks up the story. 
With difficult divorces behind them both, Felipe and Elizabeth are resolved never to marry or to have children. They have exchanged vows to that effect along with promises of eternal fidelity. But their best intentions are met by a serious obstacle: Felipe cannot reside permanently in the USA unless he is legally married to an American citizen; Elizabeth is unwilling to settle permanently anywhere else except in the same country as her family. Thwarted by the law and bureaucracy they travel extensively, live frugally, struggle with their consciences and their conflicts; they even spend time apart. But the authorities are adamant: marriage is the only way for them to live together permanently in the States. To this particular couple it feels like a prison sentence.
Gilbert’s response is to delve into what marriage really means – across cultures, across countries, across the centuries. She debunks assorted myths and received wisdom, she unravels statistics and probabilities, she doesn’t shy away from the intimate details of their experiences, their inner doubts and fears. And through that experience she discovers where un-negotiable boundaries lie, where compromises must be made, and what at the end of the day is most important in life.
It’s a heart-warmingly intimate story, sharing vulnerability and mistakes, eminently readable and refreshingly honest, and feels like a happy-ever-after ending which is heartening in itself. The analytical approach will force many a reader to examine their own marriages, I suspect!
However, the Internet reveals that Gilbert’s marriage to Felipe (real name José) ended in 2016 after just nine years, and she has since had short-term relationships with others of both sexes. Takes one back to the essential premises she establishes in Commitment to ask the questions all over again.
Gone Girl
Gone Girl is one of those much-hyped books that hit the headlines big time. OK, OK, I know, I know! I’m way behind the curve here; it did indeed come out in 2012 and I did buy my hardback copy ages ago, but I’ve only just got around to reading it this week. It’s attracted thousands of reviews (with its fair share of negative ones it must be admitted), won prestigious awards, and was dubbed ‘thriller of the year’. In my case I selected it now to serve a dual purpose: to psych myself gradually back into work mode after a couple of weeks of family priorities; and to hopefully counteract a recent run of disappointing reads.
So what did I make of it? Well, I can quite see why it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but my agenda as a writer is probably atypical, and I found it gripping.
The book is divided into three parts, each one combining all the ingredients of a psychological thriller with the intense dissection of a marriage, each one taking us deeper and further into the conundrum of a relationship and the dark capabilities of the human mind. It’s ingeniously constructed, smoothly paced, with unreliable narrators providing contradictions and plot twists to keep the reader guessing right to the end. Nothing is as it seems.
It begins well with two very distinctive narrator voices – Nick Dunne (American magazine writer until computers took over the world and the economy went down the plughole) and his wife Amy (writer of personality quizzes and reluctant model for a series of books about Amazing Amy). One paragraph in each voice to give a flavour:
Nick: My morning breath warmed the pillow, and I changed the subject in my mind. Today was not a day for second-guessing or regret, it was a day for doing. Downstairs, I could hear the return of a long-lost sound: Amy making breakfast. Banging wooden cupboards (rump-thump!), rattling containers of tin and glass (ding-ring!), shuffling and sorting a collection of metal pots and iron pans (ruzz-shuzz!). A culinary orchestra tuning up, clattering vigorously toward a finale, a cakepan drum rolling along the floor, hitting the wall with a cymballic crash. Something impressive was being created, probably a crepe, because crepes are special, and today Amy would want to cook something special.
It was our five-year anniversary.
Amy: Tra and la! I am smiling a big adopted-orphan smile as I write this. I am embarrassed at how happy I am, like some Technicolor comic of a teenage girl talking on the phone with my hair in a ponytail, the bubble above my head saying: I met a boy!
But I did. This is a technical, empirical truth. I met a boy, a great, gorgeous dude, a funny, cool-ass guy.
She is the woman that every American girl (allegedly) aspires to be – beautiful, brilliant, inspiring, and very wealthy. He is the guy that all American men (allegedly) admire – handsome, funny, bright and charming. But on 5 July, their seemingly perfect world comes crashing down when Amy Elliott Dunne disappears, leaving behind a scene of overturned furniture and hastily mopped up blood, the iron still switched on, a half-pressed dress still on the board. It’s their fifth wedding anniversary.
They’ve had their problems: redundancy, ill parents, financial reversals, but Nick is appalled and bewildered (allegedly) when evidence mounts against him, clear motives are identified, and he becomes chief suspect in Amy’s supposed murder. Every year on their anniversary Amy has prepared a treasure hunt reflecting their in-jokes and secret knowledge of each other; this year the clues seem weighted in a sinister and damning way. The police, the press, friends, family, neighbours watch mesmerized as the Dunne’s seemingly charmed lives unravel to reveal a very different reality.
Any author skilled enough to hold all those timelines and lies and plot twists together and unpack a story as deviously compelling as this, deserves enormous admiration. I was constantly checking and double checking and worrying about links far less complicated than this in my own books, so it was no surprise to read that Gillian Flynn had pieces of paper and index cards taped all over the walls of her office as she wrote Gone Girl, and by the time she’d finished the room ‘looked like the lair of a serial killer‘ with ‘crazy words and questions fluttering from every surface‘. The end result is so tight and assured and beautifully dovetailed because of this meticulous attention to detail and thorough cross-checking. Top marks there.
I rarely watch films of books I’ve read – they never match with my imagined characters and places, and usually miss out vital components, but in this case I made an exception. Given the complexity of the story, surely no film could do justice to the printed version, all the unreliable elements, all the deceptions. But it can and it does*. Perhaps that’s in no small measure a tribute to the author who herself contributed to the screenplay. Her parents were both community-college professors – her mother teaching reading; her father, film, and according to her website Gillian ‘spent an inordinate amount of her youth nosing through books and watching movies‘. That could explain a lot. Whatever, Gillian Flynn certainly has an amazing talent; she’s indisputably a master of ‘dark and nasty‘!
I am now absorbed in the tactic of unreliable narrator …
*NB. The filmmakers need to take lessons in the properties of blood! The scenes involving copious amounts of it are entirely unconvincing.