Elizabeth Gilbert is aware that her latest book may come as a surprise to some of her more casual fans. The writer became immensely famous - and wealthy - after her bestselling memoir Eat Pray Love, documenting her spiritual and emotional journey as she travelled while recovering from her (first) divorce. It sold millions of copies and became a feature film starring Julia Roberts as Gilbert.
But this wasn’t the end of Gilbert’s story, and All the Way to the River is a very different book. In it, Gilbert grapples with grief and addiction, and reveals one of the darkest moments of her life where she found herself planning to murder her girlfriend Rayya. Her girlfriend who was dying of cancer and relapsing into drug addiction.
The author is well aware of how shocking this all sounds.
“I mean, I’m the nice lady who wrote Eat Pray Love,” she writes. “And I came very close to premeditatedly and cold-bloodedly murdering my partner because she had taken her affection away from me, and because I was extremely tired,” she adds. “That’s the sort of person I become when I’m in my insanity.”
It was not an idle thought, either. “I want to make something extremely clear here: When I say that I once planned to murder Rayya, I don’t mean that the idea simply crossed my mind that my life would be easier if she were gone,” Gilbert writes. “I mean that I fully intended to kill her.”
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Whispers of Gilbert’s revelations began spreading online as a carefully planned marketing campaign kicked off. An extract from All the Way to the River was published in The Cut, the New York-based magazine that has gifted the world extraordinary essays such as The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger. In it, Gilbert details how her friendship with her hairdresser, Rayya, suddenly became something more when the latter received a terminal cancer diagnosis. Gilbert left her husband (the one she met in Eat Pray Love) to support her in the final months of her life.
I want to make something extremely clear here... I fully intended to kill her”
That part of the story we already knew. Gilbert has already written about her later-in-life queer romance. What people didn’t know at the time, however, was that Rayya’s extreme pain in her final months resulted in an opioid prescription that quickly snowballed into a return to Class A drugs. Which Gilbert facilitated. Along with gifts including a Rolex and Range Rover she showered Rayya with in her final months, she also gave her money for drugs and collected clean needles for her. Still, The Cut extract buried the murder-plot lede. It was Jia Tolentino’s review for the New Yorker that alerted readers to the darkest twist. Then Gilbert published another, even franker excerpt in The Guardian.
So, how close did the ‘nice lady who wrote Eat Pray Love’ get to murder? Pretty darn close! She recalls taking her lover’s medication to a park in New York to plan how she could drug her. Her pre-meditation went so far as to wonder whether she could score lines into painkiller tablets to make them resemble sleeping pills. “If I could knock her out with the sleeping pills,” Gilbert recalls, “then I could stick a whole bunch of fentanyl patches on her back once she was unconscious, and that would surely kill her.”
But when she returned to the penthouse apartment she’d rented for them, she feared Rayya sussed her plan out. So she left again, seriously considering suicide. But thankfully called all her friends to admit how bad things had become. It was those conversations, says Gilbert, that also made her realise she also might be an addict herself — to sex and love.
She kicks Rayya out of the apartment-turned-drug-den (their landlord is trying to sell it out from under them), and her ex-lover goes to spend her final months with her ex-wife Stacey. As Stacey weans Rayya off hard drugs and helps her find peace, Gilbert wrestles with “grace envy” —her own snarling demons of jealousy that she couldn’t be the one to be the “f***ing angel”.
“Suddenly I had a shit ton of money”
Honestly, the flirtation with murder is one of the least interesting moments of the book. Gilbert also channels the ghost of Rayya’s mother, speaks to her dead lover (either in person or, in one wild passage, through a medium), and goes on an ayahuasca trip where she reports interviewing the cancer cells that killed her beloved. The cancer cells hated their job, by the way. She shaves all her hair off, gets sober from literally everything, and takes five years to find out how to put the experience into words.
True Gilbert fans know that the writer always had wildness in her. This is the woman whose GQ article bought us Coyote Ugly. Whose fiction novel The Signature of All Things included strange masturbation closet rituals and queer unconsummated love. There is also a lot of, the be terribly British about it, woo in All the Way to the River. Along with channeling the dead, Gilbert regularly returns to her theory of Earth School, where souls looking for a challenging curriculum arrange to put each other through trauma in order to learn.
What is particularly fascinating is the clear link between the success of Eat Pray Love and Gilbert’s descent into near-madness. She feared it had resigned her artistic output to the “chick-lit dungeon” while the royalty cheques became a huge mental burden. “Suddenly I had a shit ton of money,” writes Gilbert. “Here’s what happens when you give a lot of money to a crazy codependent person: They do crazy codependent things with it.”
She tried to give as much of it as possible away, but during her recovery in Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous realises that even these supposedly generous acts were attempts to desperately draw people closer to her. She even fears that by offering Rayya rent-free accommodation early in their friendship she had actually “lured her” away from her sobriety support system in New York and into their emotional entanglement.
It is not a tell-all memoir. Gilbert draws clear boundaries, refusing to discuss any details of her upbringing that may have laid the foundations to her sex and love addiction. She also demurs on discussing the end of her last marriage, out of respect for her ex-husband.
But she is excoriatingly frank about how wonderful Rayya - her “ex junkie, ex felon, post punk, glamour-butch dyke” best friend was and how terrible addiction made her. She also is clear-eyed about her own part in their co-dependent nightmare, and the wake of devastation Gilbert’s own addictions left in her life and others’.
Like the romantic crash and burn Gilbert describes, a wild ride of a book. I devoured it in one sitting. If you loved Eat Pray Love it may not be your speed. But if you’re a fan of addiction memoirs that are prepared to get down in the mucky darkness of life, it’s an instant classic. Whether Julia Roberts would be up for reprising her role remains to be seen.
All the Way to the River: Love, Loss and Liberation by Elizabeth Gilbert, published via Bloomsbury, is on sale in hardback now.
