Eat, Pray, Love

In Eat, Gilbert’s year-long journey is spurred by an ugly divorce. She’s seeking self-healing and wisdom on her trip. In Committed, she’s struggling with the need to marry the man she met on her Eat, Pray, Love journey. [He's not an American citizen, and thanks to some fun with INS, they must either marry or live the rest of their lives outside the United States, problematic for them both.]

I was excited to read Committed after enjoying Eat so much. I don’t understand the critics who’ve called this book self-indulgent. Of course it’s self-indulgent. So was Eat, Pray, Love. This is serious navel-gazing. Gilbert notes as much and doesn’t apologize for it. So that’s pointless criticism to me.

I will say, don’t pick this up if you don’t like chick lit. It’s not chick lit exactly, but I can’t see a lot of men I know choosing this over a military history, for instance. My love of this book was quite personal, though. Gilbert struggles mightily with the mental anguish the failure of her first marriage caused. I divorced my first husband years ago, but it’s difficult to explain to others to this day, though I remain convinced it was in both our best interests. [I mean, not that it's any of your business.]

It’s easy to understand a divorce when someone cheats or commits another egregious fault like spousal abuse. I think that if those things have never happened to you [as they never have to me], you are alarmed not by a divorce that follows one spouse’s indiscretion — but you are terrified by divorces that have no visible explanation. If it can happen to them….

And Gilbert starts in such a hard place to contemplate her second marriage. The end of her first was so painful that she cannot think of marrying again, and her new partner is also pleased to be forever connected, forever unofficial about it. When the United States Homeland Security administration tells them they must marry for her partner to re-enter the U.S., they are truly conflicted, but decide to go ahead with plans as soon as he is allowed back.

I think even some people who loved her first book will find her difficulties with remarriage to be disingenuous, but I believed every word. I don’t have any way to know how much my thoughts about marriage have changed simply because I am older, how much was shaped by my first marriage [though I must assume quite a lot there], and how much by what I want for my children. I just know that I think about it almost completely differently now than I did when I first married in 1993. So I found Gilbert’s journey and philosophizing both genuine and interesting. Your mileage will vary, depending on your perspective, I suspect.

When I saw this book advertised on Amazon back before the holidays, I quickly added it to my wish list. And I was incredibly disappointed when, after the NYC sister and her husband ordered it for me, it was backordered. I was so delighted the day it arrived about a week ago.

And I really wanted to rank this book as “Highly recommended! Don’t miss!” But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Because the only thing I can say is, I hope this was somehow rushed to press [though one of the charts in the book is a 4-page explanation of exactly how long it took to create the book, so that seems unlikely]. Because it’s riddled with errors — some small, and some more consequential.

In my case, the small ones are actually the more bothersome. Throughout the book, you’ll see two spaces randomly stuck in the middle of a sentence, kind of like  this. I’m not sure the average reader will notice these, but I’ve proofread copy my entire adult life, and I can’t not see that dumb error. [I even notice when there are two spaces between sentences in printed works. Unlike what you learned in typing class in high school, one space is now the standard. It has to do with computer-based typography, but I won't bore you with further details.]

But the reviewers on Amazon point out that there are actually errors in the graphs as well, and for many people, that will be a bigger issue.

I would say, you’ll probably enjoy reading this, and you’ll learn a lot from the unique perspective McCandless brings to data visualization, but read carefully.

The book has been pretty widely reviewed, but in case you aren’t familiar with it: The Help tells the story of Jackson, MS, in the early 1960s through the eyes of a young white woman and several black women who work as maids. Skeeter Phelan is just out of Ole Miss without a husband or serious prospects, much to her mother’s dismay. She wants to be a writer, and she decides to interview local black women working as maids for her friends.

Reviews of this book tend to focus on whether or not the experience of the maids, and their vernacular, is believable and authentic. Let me first tell you that I don’t have a lot of way to know. I was born in 1971 and grew up in rural West Tennessee…which just isn’t the same thing at all as Jackson in the early 1960s. At the same time, I lived my childhood in the South just a few years removed from the height of the Civil Rights movement. I still don’t think I fully understand what I’ve seen and experienced in my lifetime. My views on race and the implications of race in politics and economics continue to evolve. I see my childhood and young adulthood through a different lens today than I did even 5 years ago, and a completely different way than I did at the time.

My family had a maid when I was growing up. Henrietta came to our house at least a couple of times a week throughout my childhood. She was our babysitter when my parents went out. She was a confidante to my sisters and me. And she loved us dearly, and we her.

I really can’t say our experience [either ours or Henrietta's] was like those described in The Help, despite the obvious similarities that we lived in the South, and that she was our black maid. The 10 years made a lot of difference, as did the distance between Jackson, MS, and my hometown. Henrietta worked in the produce department at my dad’s grocery store the other days of the week. I’ve never heard my parents use the n-word, and they were saddened by racist attitudes that were common in our hometown. I know their attitudes — probably not the majority views of white people in my hometown at the time, to be honest — were critical in shaping the way I viewed race.

And yet.

I find the book incredibly believable. Every bit of it. Stockett didn’t set out to write a social history, but a novel. And I find her novel to be one that speaks to an ugly but awakening time in our history with an authentic voice.

Of course, the challenge is in executing his simple principles. Reading this book reminded me that so often, the PowerPoint we see is just the second or third draft — not a final presentation. I’ve been guilty of this in the past myself. I get all my thoughts out in PowerPoint and then I tweak them a bit, and I act like I’m done.

But Reynolds [who authors a popular blog on the same topic, Presentation Zen] reminds us that PowerPoint [or Keynote, or any other slideware program] is meant to be a presentation aid — the presenter is supposed to share the information. If you can most effectively share your information via the slides, why would you do a presentation at all? Couldn’t you just forward the slides and save everyone from a needless meeting?

Instead, Reynolds wants your slides to augment the presentation you’re making. So, no more itsy-bitsy type, no more 10-bullet-point slides, no more boring images or poorly designed tables. Instead, he wants you to figure out what the essence of your presentation is, and put that on your slides. And that’s the work that many of us never do.

The real takeaway in this book is that you should be working harder on almost every presentation you make. If you can commit to doing that, Reynolds can give even non-designers some basic design principles to make your point more effective.

[Thanks to Michael Hyatt for this book recommendation. If you are in digital media or publishing and not reading his blog, well, fix that right now!]

The criticism leveled at this book [and somewhat at its predecessor] is that the authors are too clever by half, and they are more interested in telling a good tale than in elucidating the solutions to any vexing problems facing our society. And that perhaps they’re distorting the truth a bit to make their stories entertaining.

I guess my question to those critics is, what are you looking for? I certainly can’t speak for the authors of this book, but I would think their point is more to encourage us to think in new ways, and not to just take the conventional wisdom for granted. Many things we assume to be true — even based on “evidence” — simply aren’t.

So I like books like SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance, that make me review why and how I believe what I do.