Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage

Acknowledgments

This book is a work of nonfiction. I have re-​created all conversations and incidents to the best of my ability, but sometimes-for the sake of narrative coherence-I have edited down events or discussions that may have taken place over several days into one passage. Moreover, I have changed some-but not all-of the names of the characters in this story in order to protect the privacy of certain people who may not have intended, when their paths accidentally crossed mine, to show up later in a book. I thank Chris Langford for helping me track down appropriate aliases for these good people.

I am not a professional academic, nor a sociologist, nor a psychologist, nor an expert on marriage. I have done my best in this book to discuss the history of matrimony as accurately as possible, but in order to do so, I had to rely a great deal on the work of scholars and writers who have dedicated their entire professional lives to this topic. I won’t list a full bibliography here, but I must offer special gratitude to a few specific authors:

The work of the historian Stephanie Coontz has been a shining beacon for me over these last three years of study, and I cannot recommend highly enough her fascinating and extremely readable book Marriage: A History. I also owe an enormous debt to Nancy Cott, Eileen Powers, William Jordan, Erika Uitz, Rudolph M. Bell, Deborah Luepnitz, Zygmunt Bauman, Leonard Shlain, Helen Fisher, John Gottman and Julie Schwartz-​Gottman, Evan Wolfson, Shirley Glass, Andrew J. Cherkin, Ferdinand Mount, Anne Fadiman (for her extraordinary writing on the Hmong), Allan Bloom (for his contemplations on the Greek-​Hebrew philosophical divide), the many authors of the Rutgers University study on marriage, and-most delightfully and unexpectedly of all-Honore de Balzac.

Aside from these authors, the single most influential person in the shaping of this book has been my friend Anne Connell, who copy-​edited, fact-​checked, and corrected this manuscript to within an inch of its life, using her bionic eyes, her magical golden pencil, and her unparalleled expertise with “the Web nets.” Nobody-and I mean nobody-rivals the Scrutatrix for such editorial thoroughness. I have Anne to thank for the fact that this book is divided into chapters, that the word “actually” does not appear four times in every paragraph, and that every frog within these pages has been correctly identified as an amphibian and not a reptile.

I thank my sister Catherine Gilbert Murdock, who is not only a gifted writer of young adult fiction (her wonderful book Dairy Queen is a must-​read for any thinking girl between the ages of ten and sixteen), but who is also my dearly beloved friend and the greatest intellectual role model of my life. She, too, read this book with time-​consuming care, saving me from many errors of thought and sequence. That said, it is not so much Catherine’s comprehensive grasp of Western history that amazes me but her uncanny talent for somehow knowing when her homesick sister needs to be airmailed a new pair of pajamas, even when that sister is all the way over in Bangkok and feeling very lonely. In return for all Catherine’s kindness and generosity, I have offered her one lovingly crafted footnote.

I thank all the other early readers of this book for their insights and encouragement: Darcey, Cat, Ann (the word “pachyderm” is for her), Cree, Brian (this book will always be known as Weddings and Evictions just between us), Mom, Dad, Sheryl, Iva, Bernadette, Terry, Deborah (who gently suggested that I might want to mention the word “feminism” in a book about marriage), Uncle Nick (my most loyal supporter since forever), Susan, Shea (who listened to hours and hours and hours of my early ideas on this subject), Margaret, Sarah, Jonny, and John.

I thank Michael Knight for offering me a job and a room in Knoxville in 2005, and for knowing me well enough to realize that I would much prefer living in a crazy old residency hotel than anywhere else in town.

I thank Peter and Marianne Blythe for sharing their couch and their encouragement with Felipe when he landed in Australia desperate and fresh out of jail. With two new babies, a dog, a bird, and the wonderful young Tayla all living under one roof, the Blythes’ house was already overflowing, but somehow Peter and Marianne made room for one more needy refugee. I also thank Rick and Clare Hinton in Canberra, for guiding the Australian end of Felipe’s immigration process, and for watching diligently over the mail. Even from half a world away, they are perfect neighbors.

On the subject of great Australians, I thank Erica, Zo, and Tara-my amazing stepkids and daughter-​in-​law-for welcoming me so warmly into their lives. I must especially credit Erica for giving me the sweetest compliment of my life: “Thank you, Liz, for not being a bimbo.” (My pleasure, sweetheart. And right back at you.)

I thank Ernie Sesskin and Brian Foster and Eileen Marolla for guiding-purely out of the real estate-​loving goodness of their hearts- the entire complicated transaction of helping Felipe and me buy a house in New Jersey from the other side of the world. There’s nothing like receiving a hand-​drawn floor plan at three o’clock in the morning to know that somebody’s got your back.

I thank Armenia de Oliveira for leaping into action in Rio de Janeiro to save Felipe’s immigration process on that end. Also holding up the Brazilian front, as always, have been the wonderful Claucia and Fernando Chevarria-who were just as relentless in their pursuit of antique military records as they were in their encouragement and love.

I thank Brian Getson, our immigration lawyer, for his thoroughness and patience, and I thank Andrew Brenner for helping us find Brian in the first place.

I thank Tanya Hughes (for offering me a room of my own at the beginning of this process) and Rayya Elias (for offering me a room of my own at the end).

I thank Roger LaPhoque and Dr. Charles Henn for their hospitality and elegance at the budget oasis of the Atlanta Hotel in Bangkok. The Atlanta is a wonder that must be seen to be believed, and even then it cannot really be believed.

I thank Sarah Chalfant for her endless confidence in me, and for her years of constant encircling protection. I thank Kassie Evashevski, Ernie Marshall, Miriam Feuerle, and Julie Mancini for completing that circle.

I thank Paul Slovak, Clare Ferraro, Kathryn Court, and everyone else at Viking Penguin for their patience as I wrote this book. There are not many people left in the world of publishing who would have said “Take as much time as you need” to a writer who had just missed a major deadline. Throughout this entire process, nobody (except myself) has put any pressure on me whatsoever, and that has been a rare gift. Their care hearkens back to an earlier and more gracious way of doing business, and I am grateful to have been the recipient of such decency.

I thank my family-especially my parents and my grandmother, Maude Olson-for not hesitating to allow me to explore in print my very personal feelings about some of their most complicated life decisions.

I thank Officer Tom of the United States Department of Homeland Security for treating Felipe with such an unexpected degree of kindness during his arrest and detention. And that is the most surreal sentence I have ever written in my life, but there it is. (We’re not really sure that your name was actually “Tom,” sir, but that’s how we both remembered it, and I hope that at least you know who you are: a most unlikely agent of destiny who made a bad experience far less bad than it might have been.)

I thank Frenchtown for bringing us home.

Lastly, I offer my greatest gratitude to the man who is now my husband. He is a private person by nature, but unfortunately his privacy ended the day he met me. (He is now known to an awful lot of strangers around the world as “that Brazilian guy from Eat, Pray, Love.”) In my defense, I have to say that I did give him an early chance to dodge all this exposure. Back when we were first courting, there came an awkward moment when I had to confess that I was a writer, and what that meant for him. If he stayed with me, I warned, he would eventually end up revealed in my books and in my stories. There was no way of getting around it; that’s simply how it goes. His best chance, I made clear, would be to leave right then, while there was still time to escape with dignity and discretion intact.

Despite all my warnings, though, he stayed. And he stays with me still. I believe this has been a great act of love and compassion on his part. Somewhere along the line, this wonderful man seems to have recognized that my life would not have a coherent story line anymore without him at the center of it.