I thank my family—especially my parents and my grandmother, Maude Olson—for not hesitating to allow me to explore in print my very personal feelings about some of their most complicated life decisions.
I thank Officer Tom of the United States Department of Homeland Security for treating Felipe with such an unexpected degree of kindness during his arrest and detention. And that is the most surreal sentence I have ever written in my life, but there it is. (We’re not really sure that your name was actually “Tom,” sir, but that’s how we both remembered it, and I hope that at least you know who you are: a most unlikely agent of destiny who made a bad experience far less bad than it might have been.)
I thank Frenchtown for bringing us home.
Lastly, I offer my greatest gratitude to the man who is now my husband. He is a private person by nature, but unfortunately his privacy ended the day he met me. (He is now known to an awful lot of strangers around the world as “that Brazilian guy from Eat, Pray, Love.”) In my defense, I have to say that I did give him an early chance to dodge all this exposure. Back when we were first courting, there came an awkward moment when I had to confess that I was a writer, and what that meant for him. If he stayed with me, I warned, he would eventually end up revealed in my books and in my stories. There was no way of getting around it; that’s simply how it goes. His best chance, I made clear, would be to leave right then, while there was still time to escape with dignity and discretion intact.
Despite all my warnings, though, he stayed. And he stays with me still. I believe this has been a great act of love and compassion on his part. Somewhere along the line, this wonderful man seems to have recognized that my life would not have a coherent story line anymore without him at the center of it.
1 Pardon me for a moment. This is such an important and complicated point that it warrants the only footnote of this whole book. When sociologists say that “marriage is extremely good for children,” what they really mean is that stability is extremely good for children. It has been categorically proven that children thrive in environments where they are not subjected to constant unsettling emotional changes—such as, for instance, an endless rotation of Mom’s or Dad’s new romantic partners cycling in and out of the home. Marriage tends to stabilize families and prevent such upheavals, but not necessarily. These days, for instance, a child born to an unmarried couple in Sweden (where legal marriage is increasingly passé, but where family bonds are quite solid) has a greater chance of living forever with the same parents than a child born to a married couple in America (where marriage is still revered but divorce runs rampant). Children need constancy and familiarity. Marriage encourages, but cannot guarantee, familial solidity. Unmarried couples and single parents and even grandparents can create calm and stable environments in which children can thrive, outside the bonds of legal matrimony. I just wanted to be very clear about that. Sorry for the interruption, and thanks.
Committed Page 29