Elizabeth Gilbert’s Latest Epiphanies
“Elizabeth Gilbert has a new memoir out.” The mere sentence radiates gentle inspiration—watercolors, billowy pants with elephants printed on them, sparkly truthtelling in a big straw hat. Gilbert had an estimable career as a journalist and a writer of fiction before she published “Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia,” in 2006, a book that became not just a best-seller or even a phenomenon but something more like a cultural paradigm. Gilbert’s autobiographical account of a yearlong, post-divorce, mid-thirties rediscovery of herself was read by millions, many of whom, when they picture Gilbert, likely see Julia Roberts, who starred in the film adaptation, which grossed two hundred million dollars worldwide. Upon hearing that Gilbert has written another memoir—her first proper return to that deliriously, exclusively personal form since “Eat, Pray, Love,” although she’s published four other books in the interim—these readers may imagine that they’re in for more of what was on the movie poster: a plucky blonde, gelato spoon in mouth, ready for adventure and revelation to blow in on the breeze.
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Here is what actually happens in the new book, called “All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation.” Gilbert, newly flush with seemingly unlimited cash, and filled with both a desire to be useful and the existential unease of someone who has just won the lottery, begins covering her friends’ therapy bills and tuition payments, and lavishing jewelry, weddings, and houses (plural) on them. At one point, after the 2008 financial crisis, she walks down a street in New Jersey asking small-business owners if they need money. Then her friend Rayya—a hot queer hairdresser whom Gilbert met during her first marriage—hits a rough patch, and Gilbert moves her out of a Chelsea apartment and into a New Jersey church that she bought sight unseen from Laos. (Gilbert had intended it to be a home for herself and her second husband, whom she met during her “Eat, Pray, Love” year.) Gilbert falls in love with Rayya, though she doesn’t admit this to Rayya or to her husband. Instead, she proposes that Rayya write a memoir in lieu of paying rent, and asks her to travel with her, ostensibly so that Rayya can do her hair and makeup for professional appearances. By 2013, Gilbert is admitting to a stranger in a book-signing line that the only reason she and Rayya aren’t a couple is that Gilbert is married and “trying to be good.” Rayya, who is an alcoholic and a heroin addict in recovery, has begun openly drinking again.
Three years later, Rayya is given a diagnosis of liver and pancreatic cancer and told that she has six months to live. Gilbert ends her marriage, confesses her love to Rayya, and takes an end-stage rocket ship to the romantic stratosphere. When Rayya refuses chemo, Gilbert rents her a penthouse, then starts buying her things: a Range Rover, a piano, a Rolex. Together, they gorge on food, sex, travel, pleasure. “We were ecstatic, phosphorescent, dangerous, brilliant, and full of wild courage,” Gilbert writes. “We were writing poems about each other, staying awake just to watch ourselves breathing, and pouring words of devotion back and forth.” They were “divine angels, wrapped together in a single cloak of stars.” Their love was “far more powerful,” Gilbert goes on, than the “mere alcohol, weed, Xanax, psilocybin, sedatives, sleeping pills, and ecstasy” that the two were taking—and why not? Then Rayya’s friends persuade her to do chemo after all, and her illness and the treatment together become so monstrously debilitating that she decides she needs both an hourly supply of opiates and a mountain of cocaine. These Gilbert pays for and procures.
In time, Gilbert becomes a twisted bedside nurse, tying off the arms of a “venomous junkie” who has already lived nine months longer than the doctors thought she would. And yet this off-kilter enabler remains Elizabeth Gilbert, a woman who could, in under thirty seconds, locate transcendent human insight in a nuclear-waste dump. She tells herself, “Rayya is my most beautiful story.” Then, losing the faith, she decides to murder Rayya, literally, by switching her morphine pills with sleeping pills and covering her in fentanyl patches—a plot that fails only because Rayya somewhat demonically cottons on to the plan and thwarts it. Gilbert realizes that she has hit rock bottom, that she is a sex-and-love addict—an addict all around, actually. This becomes the organizing principle and revelation of the book: Gilbert’s journey with Rayya is merely an extreme version of a dynamic that “all of us” can relate to, Gilbert tells her readers, because, like addicts, we have all grasped desperately at “relief from the sting of life.”
I’m not sure that’s true. I’m also not sure that it needs to be. Those who follow Gilbert on social media will know the broad outlines of the Rayya story, but the most dire moments in the memoir were not previously public, and those moments make the book’s self-help framework seem both unnecessary—who could possibly stop reading this?—and wildly mismatched. Gilbert is funnier and more self-aware than the public image of her, a fate not unusual for women writers. But the funniest line in the book is one that was not meant to get laughs: “Even if your wheels have never fully come off, I suspect, at some level, that I might be you, and that you might be me, and that all of us might be Rayya.” The “Eat, Pray, Love” paradigm always rested on the premise that Gilbert, a woman who is profoundly and obviously exceptional, could function as a blueprint for the ordinary woman. This notion may have finally reached its end point.
Perhaps there is a direct metaphysical connection between Christmas-tree farms and main-character syndrome: like Taylor Swift, Elizabeth Gilbert grew up amid fields of fir and pine. She went to N.Y.U. for college, hoping to become a writer; upon graduating, rather than pursue an M.F.A., she tried to gather material by having an interesting life. Inspired by Hemingway’s “In Our Time,” she sought out the kind of jobs Nick Adams might have had, such as being a trail cook on a ranch in Wyoming. She wrote a short story, “Pilgrims,” about an East Coast girl, Martha Knox, who is hired to work on a ranch, and in 1993 it ran in Esquire, marking her début as a writer of fiction. A collection of stories, also called “Pilgrims,” followed, in 1997. The stories are lovely and funny, vivid but restrained. “Pilgrims,” which is narrated by the ranch owner’s son, ends in classic short-story style, gesturing toward epiphany while studiously fending it off. Looking at the sky, the narrator notices that the stars seem unusually close. “This one star, though, left a slow thin arc, like a cigarette still burning flung over our heads,” Gilbert writes. “If Martha Knox saw this, it was only as she was reaching up already with one hand for her horse’s reins, and it wasn’t something she mentioned.”
Much of Gilbert’s early work displays an awareness of both the profundity and the transience of romance, and of the many different universes that one life can open into or contain. An anomalously surreal short story called “The Finest Wife” came to her fully formed in a dream while she was napping on a commuter train—she has called this the “only objective, magical, creative experience of my life.” In the story, an old woman is driving a school bus in rural Minnesota, and the passengers who board are her former flings and lovers and soul mates, who help her remember and bid farewell to a long life.
Gilbert began working as a journalist, and quickly established herself as a student of masculinity who had an excess of feminine charm. In “The Muse of the Coyote Ugly Saloon,” a 1997 GQ piece, she wrote about the tough, sexy, unhinged girls with whom she had bartended in the East Village, and their regulars (“Nazi Dave, Vietnam Bob, Spit-Take Phil”), and all the ways that the former seduced and fended off the latter. (In 2000, it became the basis for an essentially perfect movie.) There was a time, she writes, “when I measured a good night by the number of marriage proposals I received.” Another GQ piece, from 1998, was about a survivalist woodsman named Eustace Conway, who ate roadkill and wore handmade buckskin. Conway rode a horse across America, sleeping under the stars and inspiring a vicarious longing that seems prophetic of Gilbert’s own path. “From coast to coast, Americans of every conceivable background had looked up at Eustace Conway on his horse and said wistfully, ‘I wish I could do what you’re doing,’ ” Gilbert writes. “To every last citizen, Eustace had replied, ‘You can.’ ” Gilbert expanded the profile into a book called “The Last American Man.” Janet Maslin, reviewing the book in the Times, noted that it “treads as thin a line between honesty and self-conscious myth making as Mr. Conway does,” and suggested that it was headed for “the kind of popularity that will only complicate Mr. Conway’s problems.”
But it was Gilbert’s popularity, driven by that mixture of honesty and mythmaking, that would lead to complicated problems. “Eat, Pray, Love” was so marketable (unaffiliated travel packages materialized around the world) and so easily caricatured (there was a “South Park” episode called “Eat, Pray, Queef,” a parody novel called “Drink, Play, F@#k”) that people quickly forgot how purely pleasurable the book is to read. Here’s Gilbert on learning Italian: “Every word was a singing sparrow, a magic trick, a truffle for me. I would slosh home through the rain after class, draw a hot bath, and lie there in the bubbles reading the Italian dictionary aloud to myself, taking my mind off my divorce pressures and my heartache. The words made me laugh in delight.” In a review for the Times, Jennifer Egan called Gilbert’s prose “close to irresistible,” adding, “If a more likable writer than Gilbert is currently in print, I haven’t found him or her.” Gilbert frequently refers to herself in the third person (“The first summer of Liz and David looked like the falling-in-love montage of every romantic movie you’ve ever seen”), describes her love affairs as world-historically magical (“We had more fun waiting in line together at the Department of Motor Vehicles than most couples have on their honeymoons”), and communes with the spirit of her ex-husband (“Hi, sweetie,” she says, after summoning his spirit to the rooftop of an ashram). All of this is made bearable not only by Gilbert’s literary talent but by her eagerness to find people extraordinary, by the frankness with which she writes about feeling broken—“I came to fear nighttime like it was a torturer’s cellar,” she confesses—and by her obvious empathy upon encountering brokenness in others.
Still, her temperament is so strong, and her outlook so positive, that she never actually seems broken on the page—when she writes about indecision and confusion, she comes off as clear and decisive. This makes her a particular sort of narrator: always freshly emerging from a dark wood, breathless with revelation that may or may not stick. This manner of self-presentation is perhaps Gilbert’s primary contribution to the culture; it shows up in the work of her literary descendants, particularly the spiky and passionate confessionalist Glennon Doyle, who published three memoirs of self-reinvention before reaching her mid-forties. Gilbert also paved the way for Cheryl Strayed, whose best-selling wilderness memoir, “Wild,” led to a career in the realm of soulful, raw-ish advice and self-help, and for Brené Brown, an academic who functions as a life coach for the “Eat, Pray, Love” demographic, writing about courage and vulnerability and shame. (In 2015, Doyle, Strayed, and Brown joined up with Gilbert and the author Rob Bell to form the Compassion Collective, and, in a little over a day, they raised more than a million dollars for aid to Syrian refugees.)
Cartoon by Emily Bernstein
But Gilbert’s most pervasive influence can be found online, in the breathless having-just-finally-realized tone that dizzying numbers of women who narrate their lives on the internet have adopted. On social media, many of the most chaotic and emotionally lawless people you’ve ever known are posting on a regular basis about having at long last achieved inner peace. Many among us, after observing this cringe-inducing side effect of regular self-narration at mass scale, have given up altogether on sincere ideas of personal epiphany. But even those who might seek to subvert that tone, or invoke it ironically, are negotiating the same conventions. Gilbert may be patient zero for the latter-day memoirist mind-set: so many women—and I would never exclude myself—have come to believe, at some level, that they, too, are Elizabeth Gilberts, people who search hard and love harder, whose personal journeys can and should captivate millions, whose flaws and failings only make them better heroines in the end.
Gilbert’s prose in “All the Way to the River” is often strangely flat and clipped. She has given two TED talks on creativity, which together have been viewed more than twenty-four million times; in 2015, she wrote “Big Magic,” a best-selling book on the subject, which is full of spirited and generous advice for artists. The new book reads, at times, like the transcript of a TED talk—in one chapter, Gilbert introduces the metaphor of “Earth school,” in which we might envision our planet as “the toughest and most elite accredited academy for spiritual ascension in the entire universe,” and suggests that instead of asking “Why me?” we should ask “How might this terrible situation be perfectly designed to help me to evolve?”
Much of the book is like this, with one-sentence paragraphs surrounded by white space, somewhat in the manner of an Instagram post. (The online writing that she influenced may now be influencing her.) Gilbert’s colloquial style, once a source of great pleasure, has tipped into new territory—an ingenuousness that blends guru and disciple, mother and child. “That’s some real Obi-Wan Kenobi shit right there, and it was kind of blowing my mind,” she writes. Often, the book reads less like her early work and more like the Substack that she started writing in 2023, “Letters from Love with Elizabeth Gilbert,” which now has almost two hundred thousand subscribers. It is categorized not under “Literature” but under “Faith & Spirituality.”
In the book, Gilbert frames her journey with Rayya as a sort of test strip for the universe: take a love affair for the ages, dip it in an unbelievable amount of mutual suffering, and see what color everything turns. At its nadir, when Rayya is gobbling morphine pills and shooting cocaine and snarling at hospice nurses, Gilbert begins questioning the nature of existence. Is the universe malicious, or merely indifferent? Or perhaps the cosmos is fundamentally friendly to us, and there is a purpose behind all the hurt that we cause and feel? Gilbert begins “to see this situation as a divinely appointed challenge,” at which point there is “no doubt whatsoever,” she tells us, “about what I would have to do next.”
