100 Books Like Committed

This book met me in one of the darkest seasons of my life after my second divorce.

Pema Chödrön’s voice feels like a steady heartbeat—calm, wise, and utterly human. She doesn’t promise to remove pain; she invites us to stay present with it. Every page taught me that courage isn’t the absence of fear but the willingness to face it with open eyes and a soft heart.

I return to this book whenever I need to remember that groundlessness is not failure; it can be the greatest freedom.

This classic has been around for decades for good reason. I found it when I suffered my first heartbreak at the age of 18, when my boyfriend of 3 years and I broke up. I felt adrift, alone, devastated, and lost. I was so overcome with grief that no one–not even my best friend-could reach me. Yet this book did.

I felt mirrored in my sorrow and comforted by the format, which offered bits of truth and wisdom in bite-sized pieces. I believed the authors that this too would pass, and felt a ray of hope in the dark. If you are in the early stage of heartbreak, this book can be a lifesaver.

I love authors who think for themselves. People who look at the state of the world, question the status quo, and wonder how to make things just a little bit better. Constance Ahrons was one of these women, and for this reason, she’s a hero of mine.

While conscious divorce is finally coming into vogue, she was the one who pioneered the idea back in the early 90s. The research she did on the impact a bad divorce had on kids was unprecedented and radical for that time.

As someone who divorced my daughter’s father when she was still young, I found that this book provided a practical roadmap on how to do this well that is still highly relevant today. 

I just like Susan Elliot. She’s decent, smart, and deeply devoted to mental health. Particularly at a time when one is vulnerable to a lack of the latter!

I found Susan’s advice to be sound and helpful. When I was at my worst, the thoughts in my head would easily loop in self-destructive ways. By focusing on the questions Susan provides, I was able to stay the course to grow myself beyond the version of me that made the mistakes I’d made. Rather than getting stuck in PTSD, Susan’s book helped me to turn it all into post-traumatic growth. 

Popular culture is littered with new archetypes of wifehood, both enacted (the “MILF,” the “trad wife,” the “Mormon Wife”) and aspirational (“I’m Looking for a Man in Finance”). 

Leonard’s highly accessible book provides a way of thinking about this taken-for-granted category and places it in a range of critical and historical contexts. One of the most important contributions she makes is to track the emergence of the “professional wife” as a new status designation and revenue raising identity.

Absorbed by Chinese culture while a grad student in Hong Kong, Susan Blumberg-Kason is charmed into marriage with Cai, a PhD student of Taoist music from the Hubei Province backwater. Marital discord arises when the openhearted Midwesterner realizes her function as a wife is to produce a son, turn it over to his (not her) parents for upbringing, and get out of the way so the husband can carry on with his philandering and porn watching. But even as he molts his intellectual shell and his narcissistic monster emerges, Cai can also be sympathetically understood as a product of his culture. Intercultural conflict is what makes this fairy tale so readable and engrossing, with its timeless theme of the loving sweetheart enthralled and entrapped in her dark prince's perverted castle. What moved me most was Blumberg-Kason’s honesty in laying everything bare, at the risk of baring her own flaws.

I found Wall’s first-hand account of what life is like inside a polygamist cult to be both revealing and tragic. The book is nonfiction but reads like a novel. I loved how the pages were full of descriptive passages that gave me an insider’s view of what these young girls are taught and must face as child brides. It helped me see that what began decades before is still happening under a cloak of secrecy. I found this book revealing and disturbing, and one I couldn’t put down.

For years, I had an itch to try my hand at writing, but I could never come up with a decent storyline. All my stories were in the spy-thriller genre (think John Le Carre), and they were all dreadful. While I loved the spy thriller genre, I also read a wide variety of mystery-thrillers and happened upon the book Spencerville by Nelson DeMille.

The story revolves around three characters who are caught up in a love triangle and struggle for power in a small town in the USA. I was totally captivated by the book and how a simple story involving only three main characters could be so compelling and entertaining. And, not only did I enjoy the story, but it made me rethink the kind of books I wanted to write. I moved away from the spy thriller genre and started thinking about stories I could write in a… show more.

There is something in the way this author writes that always hooks me. Every single time I read one of her novels, I’m left with a feeling of…nothing else will be as good. You know that feeling right? There are so many twists in this story, some I didn’t see coming, that not only had me reading way too late at night, but nothing else I picked up the next day grabbed my attention like this book did. To me, that’s the perfect book-hangover to have.

This book explores the themes of loss, grief, and fidelity to one’s marriage, even once that relationship is unraveling. The prose is precise, and the narrator’s inner life is seemingly transparent. At the same time, it’s a mystery: why did the narrator’s husband disappear while doing research for a book on mourning rituals in southern Greece? And why does she hide the secret of their marital separation—and her new life with a new man—from her mother-in-law, who insists she track down her son, Christopher?

The narrator seeks out her soon-to-be ex at her mother-in-law's command, only to discover a tragic event. The ties to a failing love and a distant family are strengthened and the reader’s expectations upended. I loved how Kitamura took existential issues and boiled them down into a deceptively quiet story.