It’s often said that the most boring conversation you’ll ever have is when someone tells you about a dream they had. I disagree: the single most tedious insight into someone’s inner life is hearing about their relationship with drugs. For some reason, many people think this is stimulating conversational material at parties. The only response is to politely nod, say “woah”, stare into your drink and plot how to slip away. Once I’ve pictured someone hallucinating while wearing a poncho, I lose all respect.
Imagine my delight, then, when I cracked open Eat, Pray, Love writer Elizabeth Gilbert’s new memoir. All the Way to the River is an account of Gilbert’s love affair with her ex-addict hairdresser, Rayya Elias, for whom she leaves her husband when said hairdresser is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Here, there is no shortage of tedious psychedelic visions. The pair begin a chaotic, narcotic love affair as Elias huffs all the gear she can at Gilbert’s expense and acquisition, vomiting and partying and quipping her way to death. Elias is a hard-bitten punk/stray pup who spent her youth doped up in the East Village but, by the time Gilbert meets her, has done her time in the “rooms” of 12-step sobriety programmes. Gilbert is a fabulously rich and famous writer who gets off on slinging people money, apartments and expensive watches to feed her “love and sex addiction”. The result is 400 pages of feverish prose, poetry and doodling (yes, really) to make sense of what I’m confident in saying must be the most spectacular midlife crisis Manhattan has ever seen.
Gilbert’s memoir has set the press gabbing in a way only comparable to her first moment in the sun nearly 20 years ago, when she published Eat, Pray, Love to memorialise that other time she left a husband in the name of self/sexual/spiritual discovery. The shockwaves prompted by Tuesday’s release must be explained by wonder that these two books are by the same woman at all — wonder that Gilbert herself shares (“I’m the nice lady who wrote Eat, Pray, Love”). Those of us who recall the 2010 Julia Roberts film adaptation — 133 misty-eyed minutes of snogging and pasta-gobbling and revelation-having — will be glad to know that Gilbert is once again “getting my inner house in order”. Only this time, self-discovery involves fewer Buddhist chants and more of this: “We were holed up in our apartment together with thousands of dollars’ worth of cocaine, much of which she was shooting into her neck and all of which, unbelievably, I was paying for.”
That Gilbert finds herself in such a situation is not so unbelievable when you appreciate the staggering naivete of her writing. After all, this is the archangel of the cult of “healing” we are talking about, a woman forever in search of a therapeutic or spiritual awakening. You sense that Gilbert is the dream client for the sorts of vampires who work in the business of self-discovery: you imagine her welded to a shrink’s chair, or sprawled on a forest floor zonked out on ayahuasca as a headdressed shaman prepares an invoice.
Reading about Gilbert’s hallucinations, I am back at that party with the drugs bore. During one such trip, she “got to interview Rayya’s cancer cells”. I drain my metaphorical drink. “I loved changing form — turning into animals, trees, air — and watching reality melt.” I look for the exit. “I’ve never once had a ‘bad trip’ on psychedelics; to me, the real world has always felt like the bad trip.” I call an Uber.
For more deep insights into Elizabeth Gilbert’s brain chemistry, you’ll simply have to buy the book. And many, many women will — fans who entered middle age during the boom of therapy culture in the 2010s and, by 2025, have frittered away the autumns of their lives studying the centre of their spiritual universes: themselves. For scores of ladies of a certain age, Gilbert has long been a lighthouse directing her readers to alternative futures — wilder, sexier, more delicious. But to read this memoir is to see that quest for enlightenment dashed on the rocks, a spectacular and ridiculous downfall. I wonder what her admirers will make of it.
Gilbert’s life seems to be a series of leaps from revelation to revelation. The book reels from her latest: that she is, like her girlfriend, an addict — “Rayya was addicted to drugs; I am addicted to people.” Now, I am loath to question another woman’s afflictions, but it seems to me that it is rather different to be addicted to crack cocaine than it is to be addicted to kisses and cuddles. Regardless, and despite having seen Elias through her relapse (“I tied off her arms or legs for her while she shot up”), Gilbert is willing to compare them. Intentionally or not, the “addict” label gives her some distinction from boring old “other people” (in other words, the middle-aged Eat, Pray, Love fans whose daredevil experimentation has probably only extended to an extramarital snog and a spliff at someone’s sixtieth). They, she explains, “might experience pleasurable sensations from romance, fantasy, or sex: I get wasted”. From this addiction, she has at the time of writing “been clean and sober for 1,617 days”. She takes us into “the hellscape” of her “addict brain”, explaining that “we addicts” are “artists, liars, lovers, criminals, users, over-givers, over-takers, over-doers… We have created some of the most beautiful things in the world, but we can also do sickening things to people.”
Gilbert not only categorises herself alongside what us normies might think of as addicts — those who die in alleyways overdosing on fentanyl or steal from their relatives to buy booze — but lets us know that those of us not in this esteemed club are, well, unremarkable. “If you’re reading this and thinking to yourself, Well, that seems quite normal! Everyone needs love, after all!, I can assure you that in my case it is not normal.” It all has the whiff of the child at school who has a cast on their arm and is so incredibly chuffed about it. At every mention of love sobriety I want to grab her by the shoulders and yell: “Well it’s not crack, is it!”
“It all has the whiff of the child at school who has a cast on their arm and is so incredibly chuffed about it.”
Gilbert’s abstinence, while no doubt brilliant for her “inner child Lizzy”, has unfortunately infected her prose with the emetic language of sobriety meetings. She discusses “emotional anorexia”. She explains how she is also “money sober” to stop impulsive spending. She excuses a man with a pregnant wife who tries to sleep with her as “probably an unrecovered sex and love addict in his own right, and therefore powerless over his own impulses”. Seemingly unable or unwilling to recount events without the sanctimonious verbiage of therapy, Gilbert comes across as brainwashed. It is a shame, because in places she is a good and interesting writer: when Elias dies, she has the look of a “newborn”, “someone who has recently arrived here… the light of another world shining through”. But these moments of originality are dulled by those where she is undeniably self-indulgent: “Other women might pull attention by the way they dress or walk or laugh or play with their hair; I pull attention with my words.”
Reading this memoir, I could not get one image out of my mind. It was of the latter-day Miranda from Sex and the City, that fiery and whipsmart New Yorker who was sacrilegiously rewritten in the bombsite series And Just Like That into a needy, whiny irritant. All the while, she is plagued by the presence of her non-binary partner Che, who fans so disliked as to have put many off watching altogether. In All the Way to the River, there are unfortunate shades of Che. Elias, the “glamour-butch dyke”, no doubt led a fascinating and much-grieved life, but her presence in the memoir — through Gilbert’s eyes, of course — rankles somewhat. She speaks like a JNCO-jeaned teenager from the Nineties (“that shit’s just fresher, yo!”). She has an improbable backstory: she “once lost a six-figure record deal because she told a Sony executive to suck her dick”, which sounds like a yarn someone would spin at the worst afters of your life. She lives rent-free and alone at Gilbert’s New Jersey house for nine years during the period in which they are just friends, hoovering up other material sweeteners along the way. She goes on a global book tour where she sermonises about sobriety while getting wasted every day on bottles of Angostura bitters (“for her digestion”). She defuses an argument at a funeral by walking up to an aggressive man and tapping him on the chest, saying: “How you doin’ in there, bud?”
But worst of all, she inspires Gilbert to write poetry. The failings of this memoir are most striking in these italicised little verses slotted between chapters. My personal favourite, “The shortest conversation I ever had with God”, goes as follows. “Me: But why? God: Because is.”
Yet Gilbert’s true love affair seems to have been not with Elias, but with the cult of therapy: having finished her book, I now feel I need some too. Despite how exceptionally mixed up this writer says she is, her rip-roaring me-moir is not fascinating because of its private chaos. It fascinates, rather, as a portrait of a generation of middle-class, middle-aged, unhappy women deranged by the mantras of self-discovery. If Eat, Pray, Love was about casting off the shackles of your thirties — rubbish husbands, body-image woes, the dreary rat race — then All the Way to the River catches up with those same women two decades on: all this time searching, and they still don’t have the answers. Gilbert’s first memoir seemed an exhortation to scoff, snog and Om your way to happiness; this radically different one retains its laser focus on the self, how I feel, above all things. But this is no prescription for life, and therapy culture/crunchy yoga mom spirituality has left many a woman untethered, lonely and, well, dull. The problem with shrinks and shamans is that they tend to keep lost people on a lifelong search for meaning instead of turning around and saying, finally: “Get it together!”
