Many of the millions – and there are millions – who’ve read Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir Eat, Pray, Love did so with a great deal of envy. They envied the way Gilbert left an unhealthy and unhappy relationship and traveled the world to Italy, India, and then to Indonesia, seeking something that would complete her spiritually and something that could bring her happiness. Her story embraced the courage that one needs to completely change their life for personal satisfaction, and many readers would love to do the same thing.
This is Gilbert’s gift. She has the ability to present her life cinematically and makes us realize how life can be if only we would allow ourselves the freedom to be participants and catalysts, not merely observers. Her work encourages this kind of spiritual seeking and advocates for embracing the turning points in one’s journey through life. But she knows most of us believe we are stuck.
Some of her critics objected to her happily-ever-after ending, where she met a gorgeous man in an exotic location and found everlasting love.
But this is Elizabeth Gilbert. This is not the end.
Her new book, All the Way to the River: Love, Loss and Liberation, which she will be talking about at Pittsburgh Arts and Lectures on Monday September 29th, begins decades after her fairy-tale ending in Indonesia. It’s another love story, as well as a confession of Gilbert’s struggles with addiction and how these two things define and enable each other.
She writes that “The only things anyone is ever trying to do is survive their minds, their histories, their dilemmas, their destinies, their days.”
Gilbert’s ruthless self-examination explores what it means to be a love and sex addict, an affliction with which she has suffered her entire life: “There are not a lot of women out there who will publicly admit to being sex and love addicts because it sounds so gnarly. In fact, it is gnarly.”
Envy might wane; but the fascination with Gilbert’s journeys has not.
She describes the disease – the way it damages the addict and ruins the lives of the people she encounters, and especially the people she loves.
An addiction to sex and love might sound less harmful than other addictions, but Gilbert allows us to see its destruction. She is desperate for people to like her. There is nothing she won’t do to get this love and approval. There was a time right after the publication of Eat Pray Love when she was flushed with money but suffering spiritually.
“Because I was determined to stay faithful to my husband, I wasn’t acting on my sex and love addiction, which meant I needed to find new and creative ways of settling my nerves and avoiding my feelings of emptiness and anxiety. That morning, I landed on a terrific way to distract myself. The stock market had collapsed only a month earlier, and I knew that people were suffering exceptional financial insecurity. So, I went for a walk down the main street of my small New Jersey town, marched into nearly every business on the strip, and asked the proprietors if they needed any money. “Could I maybe give you some kind of grant? Can I write you a check? How much money do you need? Just ask! And you never have to pay me back!”
An act of incredible generosity on the one hand, and absolute hysteria on the other. Gilbert allows us to feel her craziness.
It is in this stage of magnanimity that she offers her friend and hairdresser, Rayya Elias, a place to live. Gilbert owns an abandoned church that she and her husband bought years ago but never lived in. She believes she is saving her friend from distress by offering her this rent-free space. Gilbert is attracted to Elias’ charismatic personality. She sees her as a force of nature and feels bland and dull in comparison. She knows Elias is in recovery from drug use and alcoholism and has abused them for years. Gilbert sees a fellow soul in need and gives everything she has to maintain this friendship.
Gilbert admits this is a pattern she followed – one that never ended well. She says that “you give magical qualities to people and then become enraged when these people fail to live up to our fantasies, expectations, and projections.”
Later, Elias is diagnosed with terminal cancer, and it is then that Gilbert realizes she is in love with her good friend. She struggles against a fear of rejection but finally admits her love. Elias returns these feelings. There should be happiness – two souls coming together. But this is not an easy relationship.
“Secrecy is the greenhouse in which addiction blooms, flourishes, and metastasizes.”
Obviously, there is the cancer. And there are further complications – both are married, committed to others with people they do not want to hurt. And then there’s the fact that they are both addicts –one in recovery, one not quite there yet.
The relationship, even after it becomes public, is toxic. It then becomes brutal. In all of this, Gilbert unflinchingly chronicles the relationship.
Someone once said that a person in recovery is living without their skin – they are raw, open to every kind of hurt, pain, and vulnerability. Gilbert says for her, recovery was less about being vulnerable and more about being lost. “I felt like Bambi on ice. I didn’t know how to cope with the pain.”
She floundered. “It’s like you give all your treasures to a pawn shop – everything you have that is valuable. Then the shop closes. But you stand outside begging them to give you one teaspoon of what you’ve given to them. Just one of your grandmother’s teaspoons. You’re just asking for a tiny amount, but you can’t even get that.”
The book had a few false starts. She wrote it first as a novella, a sort of ghost story, and that was fine, but it wasn’t right. She then put together a book of poems and spiritual musings, many of which appear in this rendition. Finally, she had to tell the truth. She had to write what happened. And then what happened next, and then what happened after that. She had to get it right. She owed it to Rayya Elias. More importantly, she owed it to herself.
“All my relationships blow up,” Gilbert concludes, reflecting on a life lived as a catalyst. The one relationship that seems to be holding steady in her life is the one she has with writing. When asked what’s next, Gilbert says she is taking a rest; she wrote four books between Eat Pray Love and All the Way to the River and wants some time off.
But this is Elizabeth Gilbert. We are nowhere near the end.
