Knotty questions

A down to earth and humorous take on the changing nature, and expectations we have, of the institution of marriage.

Confession time. I don't do self-help books. Never. People in the books I read read them, people I know read them, heck, I even know of people who write them. But I've always turned up my nose and looked supercilious when a friend raved about the book that saved her life, or that must-read tome that would change the way I looked at the world. I was quite happy with my life and my POV of the world, thank you, I thought. Besides, all self-help books were about men, marriages or management, and what could a writer teach me about them that life couldn't?

Plenty, it seems to me, after reading Elizabeth Gilbert's Committed. While admittedly dancing around the fringes of the man-marriage-management formula, Gilbert brings to her follow-up to the best-selling Eat, Pray, Love the kind of common sense and insight about human relationships your mum would have been proud to pass on to you. What's more, she leavens the history with humour of the self-deprecatory kind, the research with the readability quotient of a thriller. She comes across as intelligent, kind and very much the sort of woman you'd like to have as a best friend when you're doubting the institution of marriage.

Full report here Hindu