Sit, Listen, Fawn

If you first met her in the pages of Eat, Pray, Love, you may consider Elizabeth Gilbert some kind of Voice of the American Woman — an Oprah-doing, happiness-wooing, living, breathing, om-ing guide to conquering womanly restlessness. Her follow-up memoir, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage, won’t convince you otherwise. But throw Gilbert’s bibliography in reverse, and the picture turns more muddled and more manly. Her only novel, Stern Men, is about lobster fishermen, as manly a as group there is. Her best book, The Last American Man, is about an (utterly confounding) outdoorsman who might as well have “Dude” stamped at the top of his résumé. And perhaps her best work — magazine journalism published in the cologne-scented pages of GQ and anthologized in various editions of The Best American Magazine Writing — seems to be kept afloat by testosterone, especially stories about Hank Williams III and disabled triathlete Jim MacLaren. Whether she remembers any of these men during tonight’s 7 p.m. talk and signing at Unity Temple (707 West 47th Street) may depend on the crowd; she could spend an hour talking about Julia Roberts’ hair. But it’s worth paying the $16 admission price, which includes a copy of Committed,
to find out. Call 913-384-3126 or see rainydaybooks.com for details.— Joe Tone

Tue., Feb. 15, 7 p.m., 2011