The author Elizabeth Gilbert recently announced her latest book, Committed, will be published in January 2010. It's something of a follow-up to her last book, the 2006 bestseller Eat, Pray, Love, a memoir of the year Gilbert spent searching for herself in Italy, India, and Indonesia.
I first read Eat, Pray, Love on a month-long vacation, the summer after my wedding. It was a funny choice of reading for me at the time, since the memoir begins with Gilbert sobbing on her bathroom floor as she realizes that she doesn’t want to be married anymore. Yet the ensuing journey she describes is so alluring that I found myself longing, if only momentarily, to divorce my new husband so that I, too, could spend a year traveling the world in the name of self-discovery.
Who needs a spouse, I thought, when I can travel to Italy and indulge in the best pizza in the world? “…These pizzas we have just ordered… are making us lose our minds,” Gilbert writes describing her visit to Pizzaria da Michele in Naples. “I love my pizza so much, in fact, that I have come to believe in my delirium that my pizza might actually love me in return.”
I’ve never been to Naples, but I can relate. I too have lost my heart to a Neapolitan pizza. Lucky for my husband, Doug, he was the one who introduced me to what I believe may be the best Neapolitan pizza outside of Naples. Doug had been telling me about Pepe’s Pizza in New Haven, Connecticut, since the day we met, waxing poetic about it as if it were his first love—you know, the one that got away, the memory of whom no one else will ever be able to live up to.
He’d go on to describe, in minute detail, how this magical pizza was cooked in a coal-fired oven, which burns hotter and drier than wood—essential elements for a true Neapolitan pizza. He’d tell me about the thin and blistered crust, the perfectly seasoned tomato sauce, the creamy fresh mozzarella. He’d emphasize how Pepe’s never layers on too much cheese or neglects a pizza with too little sauce.
The first time Doug took me home to meet his family was at Christmas time. I had barely said hello to my future in-laws when he tucked me into the car and whisked me down Highway 95 to New Haven. For this California girl, the northeast winter weather felt like the end of time. I think the temperature was in the teens. We arrived at Pepe’s to find a line that stretched out the door and down the block.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said. “We’re going to wait in line in the snow for pizza?”
“Trust me,” Doug said confidently. “It’s worth it.”
“This pizza better blow my mind,” I remember saying, repeatedly. My threats were met with hearty assurances from the other pathetic souls shivering outside in the snow like junkies lined up at the methadone clinic.
Finally seated, we ordered Pepe’s original “tomato pie” with mozzarella. As my husband tells it, I took one bite, looked up at him with tears in my eyes, and said, “Oh my god. You’re right. This is the best pizza in the world.” And then professed my undying love for him. Frankly, I don’t remember what I said because I was instantly rendered delirious by the perfect balance of dough, crust, and cheese, by the rich sweet tomato flavor, the bubbly creaminess where the sauce and cheese melded into one, the thin crust’s simultaneous crunch and chew, the touch of smoky goodness from where the crust had blistered up under the high heat and blackened ever so slightly. Don’t tell my husband this, but I probably would have professed my undying love to a rhinoceros if it gave me this heaven-on-a-sheet-pan to eat.
“Meanwhile, Sofie is practically in tears over hers,” Gilbert continues in her memoir. “She’s having a metaphysical crisis about it, she’s begging me, ‘Why do they even bother trying to make pizza in Stockholm?’” Indeed, why do Californians bother to top round, flat crusts with sauce and cheese at all?
Gilbert's long-awaited follow-up book, the aforementioned Committed, is scheduled to hit bookstores early next year. Considering the fact that Eat, Pray, Love made divorce sound so delicious, Gilbert seems as surprised as anyone that her next book has turned out to be about marriage (as the title snarkily implies). After her divorce, the author fully intended to eschew wedlock for life. But when her real-life Brazilian-Australian boyfriend (the character Felipe in her memoir) was prohibited from reentering the United States after a trip to Europe, marriage seemed the only answer.
“I spent about 10 months trying to learn as much as I could possibly learn about this very frustrating, contradictory, and ultimately interesting human habit,” Gilbert is quoted as saying in a recent New York Times article. As a sort-of newlywed, I just hope the new book makes marriage out to be half as appetizing as Eat, Pray, Love made divorce out to be. If not, at least Doug and I will always have Pepe’s. Or, if the going gets really rough, perhaps a second honeymoon in Naples will do the trick.
