What did you read on holidays?

Keeping things in perspective is not Gilbert’s strong suit. This is why she goes on so many trips and does so much information gathering: she wants to understand how her fellow-humans have resolved the issues that torment her.

So we should not be surprised that when Gilbert found herself on the verge of a second wedding, in a state of dread, she decided “to put a little effort into unraveling the mystery of what in the name of God and human history this befuddling, vexing, contradictory, and yet stubbornly enduring institution of marriage actually is.” She consulted books and scholars. She interviewed Hmong grandmothers in the mountains of Vietnam about their level of marital satisfaction. She went to see her grandmother.

Gilbert is understandably alarmed by what she learns. She is most affecting in “Committed” when she is contemplating the marriages of the women in her own family. Her grandmother Maude was considered ineligible for marriage, because she had a harelip, and she spent her youth independent and happy, getting a better education than her siblings and travelling from her home in Minnesota to the mountains of Montana.

During this period of giddy freedom, Maude made her own money and bought herself a glamorous coat with a fur collar. “If you ask my grandmother today about that purchase, her eyes will still flutter in absolute pleasure,” Gilbert writes. But then Maude got married after all, and moved in with her husband’s family of “severe Swedish immigrants” on their farm. Her days of travel and adventure were over, and her life became dominated by cooking, cleaning, and giving birth to seven children.

Grandma Maude’s savings were quickly depleted by the endless expenses of the farm, and when her oldest daughter was born Maude cut up her special coat to make baby clothes. “What my grandmother did with her fine coat (the loveliest thing she would ever own) is what all the women of that generation (and before) did for their families and their husbands and their children,” Gilbert writes. “They cut up the finest and proudest parts of themselves and gave it all away. They repatterned what was theirs and shaped it for others.”

“Committed” is an unfurling of Gilbert’s profound anxiety about reëntering a legally binding arrangement that she does not really believe in. All this ambivalence, expressed in her high-drama prose, can be a lot to handle. (One generally doesn’t indulge another person’s emotional processing at this length unless the jabbering is likely to conclude with sex.) Ultimately, Gilbert is clear about what she, like most people, wants: everything. We want intimacy and autonomy, security and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, coziness and thrills.

But we can’t have it. Gilbert understands this, yet she tries to convince herself and her readers that she has found a loophole. She tells herself a familiar story, that her marriage will be different. And she is, of course, right—everyone’s marriage is different. But everyone’s marriage is a compromise.