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Welcome to the Double X Audio Book Club.

I'm here with my co-co-editor, Emily Bazelon, and our managing editor, Jessica Gross.

Today we're going to be discussing Elizabeth Gilbert's new book Committed. Elizabeth Gilbert,

who should be known to all of you by now, for her fabulously successful bestseller,

Eat, Pray, Love, which has changed the lives of many women who apparently followed in her path.

She said in a lot of interviews this week. Committed begins where Eat, Pray, Love left off. It's the story of her

romance with Philippe, Philippe, Felipe, Felipe. Her Brazilian older gentleman. Yes, her

Brazilian older gentleman, who she met in Bali. And basically, it's the story about her reluctance

to marry him. And throughout this book,

she kind of rehearses lightly the arguments for and against marriage by talking to lots of

her friends, by reading a lot. And then with little suspense, marries Philippe at the end,

which is part of the problem of this book. But let's not begin there.

Let's begin where she begins, which is she starts by talking to the Hmong.

Hmong.

Hmong.

And the idea in this beginning part of the book is that she's talking to them about basically a completely different view of man and wife, seen from someone who believes in kind of

the pursuit of happiness, which is what E. Pray Love was about.

So can you guys, you know, there's a Hmong woman who says to her, all men and all women

are pretty much the same, which I thought was a really interesting kind of window into

male and female roles, you know.

Meaning that it doesn't really matter who your husband is. And the task to say, is your husband a good husband is to say, is that rock holding up the wall a good rock? Right. Right. Right. Exactly. So Jess, as someone who's recently engaged, do you think you could be engaged to my husband or Emily's husband? I mean, I definitely do not believe in the idea of one single soulmate.

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