Books about marriage, like the battered old institution itself, come in and out of fashion with writers, readers and politicians, but never quite die away. These two, from the latest crop, are by women in early middle age, both experienced journalists with several books behind them; but Elizabeth Gilbert, a chirpy American describing herself as ‘a cross between a golden retriever and a barnacle’, is flamboyantly personal and unacademic, while the quietly British Kate Figes is a careful, responsible researcher and interviewer who keeps her own marital history to the margins. All the more surprising, then, to find that their attitudes to marriage have a certain amount in common.
Gilbert, whose previous writings, she tells us, have concentrated on men and once involved cropped hair and a birdseed-stuffed condom down her trousers, wrote her book under duress. Having just finished writing Eat, Pray, Love, the story of her journey of self-discovery after a messy divorce (published in 2006, and a huge international bestseller, with a movie in the works, starring Julia Roberts), she found her romance with her Brazilian lover abruptly derailed by the U.
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