An institution to love and cherish

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. S. Department of Homeland Security, which informed them as they tried to return after a trip that he would not be allowed into the country with her again unless they got married.

This book is both the story of their ‘exile’, as they travelled the world while the matter was sorted out, and her account of how she overcame her own fears and misgivings about once again risking matrimony. Despite her disclaimers, the reader suspects, too, that having hit the jackpot with one book about a journey around the world and herself, the prospect of a repeat was hard for her and her publishers to resist.