In July 2017, the author Elizabeth Gilbert posted a message to her million-plus Facebook followers about her partner, Rayya Elias, who was dying of pancreatic and liver cancer. The message featured a video of Elias singing a song they’d written together called “Happy Home,” and Gilbert ended on a hopeful note, telling readers it was possible to find “pockets of paradise on earth, even through all the suffering and loss and pain.”
By then, Gilbert’s audience knew about Elias, her longtime friend and hairdresser turned lover. She had announced their relationship the previous fall, revealing that she had ended her marriage to be with Elias, who doctors predicted had six months to live.
But the stoic message Gilbert shared with her readers — many of them devotees since her blockbuster 2006 memoir “Eat, Pray, Love” turned her into a self-help icon — masked a much bleaker, sometimes sinister story.
Elias, a former heroin addict who had been sober for years, slid back into addiction after her diagnosis. She stayed up all night in their East Village penthouse, ingesting whiskey, morphine, Vicodin, marijuana, fentanyl and thousands of dollars worth of cocaine, which Gilbert bought from teenagers in the neighborhood.
She had become abusive and paranoid, picking invisible bugs off her skin, ranting about police surveillance, lashing out at Gilbert over imaginary failings, and refusing to let Gilbert sleep or outsource care to a home aide. To cope with the stress, Gilbert was self-medicating with booze, Xanax, Ambien, psilocybin and MDMA.
Around the time she posted the video of Elias singing, things had gotten so bad that Gilbert decided the only way to save herself was murder. Exhausted and terrified, she planned to replace Elias’s morphine with sleeping pills, then cover her with enough fentanyl patches to kill her. She had swapped the pills and was prepared to act but abandoned the plan when Elias sensed something was up and confronted her.
Looking back on that moment, which she recounts with forensic detail in her new memoir, “All the Way to the River,” Gilbert still can’t believe how close she came to killing the love of her life, and how big the chasm became between her inspirational public persona and her hellish private life.
“I’m the nice lady who wrote ‘Eat, Pray, Love,’ and I’m out in the park with fentanyl and morphine and sleeping pills trying to craft a murder,” Gilbert said in an interview at her Gramercy Park apartment, where she now leads a quiet life with her scruffy white rescue dog, Pepita.
For Gilbert, who has made a career of exposing intimate details from her life, there was never any doubt that she had to write about the murder plot, even at the risk of taking a blowtorch to her reputation.
“If you’re going to do this, if you’re going to tell this story,” she said, “then you have to tell the whole story.”
It’s hard to reconcile the version of Gilbert in the book — shellshocked, bitter, sometimes suicidal — with the version of Gilbert who is laughing and cooing at her dog, feeding her crusts while we share a dinner of pizza and salad.
Now 56, sober and celibate and committed to a 12-step program for sex and love addiction, Gilbert radiates calm and composure. With her close shaved graying hair and soft smile lines and crow’s feet, recently liberated after she stopped using Botox and fillers, she has the serene bearing of a monk — a monk with a sly, self-deprecating sense of humor. When I asked about how close she came to committing murder, Gilbert replied, “It seemed like a great idea!” a response so absurd and unfiltered that we both burst out laughing.
In a way, though, another dramatic metamorphosis is entirely in line with Gilbert’s public image. Her recent evolution is the latest in a series of radical transformations that Gilbert has chronicled in her memoirs, essays, TED Talks, speaking tours and earnest dispatches on social media, where she has 2.7 million followers.
In “Eat, Pray, Love,” Gilbert revealed how, suffocating in the confines of an unsatisfying marriage, she divorced her husband and went on a globe-spanning journey of self-discovery, chasing pleasure and beauty in Italy, seeking spiritual awakening in India and finding love in Indonesia, where she discovered romantic bliss with a Brazilian businessman. The book sold more than 18 million copies globally, was translated into dozens of languages and was adapted into a film that grossed more than $200 million.
To millions of readers, it was a handbook — a guide for how to blow up your mediocre life and find love and spiritual fulfillment in the aftermath.
“All the Way to the River” is another dramatic tale of loss and self-discovery, with a degree of exposure that’s bold even for Gilbert. “It’s the most painful stuff that I’ve shared,” she said.
Gilbert recounts falling in love with Elias, a charismatic Syrian American hair stylist and rock musician who was a former heroin addict with a criminal past. The pair met in the spring of 2000 when Gilbert — who was then a respected journalist but had yet to make her “Eat, Pray, Love” fortune — was sent to Elias by a friend for a hair intervention.
Sixteen years later, when Elias was diagnosed with cancer, Gilbert upended her life again, quitting her marriage to be with Elias. She threw herself into the new relationship, renting Elias a penthouse in the East Village and buying her a Range Rover, piano, Prada boots and a Rolex.
What began as a frantic, compressed love story as they tried to make the most of their limited time together morphed into a deranged bender. Back on hard drugs, Elias became a menace. Gilbert herself became unhinged, keeping the depths of her despair secret from all but a few close friends, until she ultimately decided to cut off Elias. In the final weeks of her life, Elias was sober and surrounded by friends and family. She reconciled with Gilbert, who was at her side when she died in 2018.
As in “Eat, Pray, Love,” the narrative bends toward redemption. Reeling from grief, Gilbert confronted her own sex and love addiction, and discovered that most of her problems stemmed from being “a crazy, needy, clingy, desperate, out-of-control, love-starved maniac.” Working within a 12-step program, she eventually regained spiritual equilibrium and peace.
It’s unclear whether Gilbert’s millions of fans will embrace her latest confessional, which exposes the limits of what she was willing to broadcast to her followers.
“I shared what I could when I could at the time, but when things were happening in real time, it wasn’t possible to be fully transparent,” she said. “I almost didn’t know what was happening.”
Early reactions suggest the memoir will be polarizing. On Goodreads, some fans have praised it as “radiantly tender” and “devastatingly vulnerable,” while other readers have expressed skepticism that borders on hostility. After an excerpt was published in New York magazine, some online commentators slammed Gilbert for writing “narcissistic drivel,” “mining her wife’s death for content” and for “telling us how to live and create when she so clearly doesn’t have a clue.”
Some of Gilbert’s close friends said it’s unsurprising that she has performed a public autopsy on her destructive and dysfunctional relationship patterns.
“I don’t think she really believes in shame,” said the author Glennon Doyle, a friend of Gilbert’s. “She’s always writing about losing yourself and finding yourself.”
Elias, who had published her own memoir, loved the idea of being immortalized in a book by Gilbert, according to Gilbert and members of Elias’s family.
But after Elias’s death, writing a book about those devastating months was the last thing Gilbert wanted to do. She committed herself into other projects and speaking gigs. She started a new romantic relationship with a man (“Detonated myself upon” might be a more accurate description,” she writes), which went predictably badly.
She wrote a new novel, “City of Girls,” in six months and finished another, “The Snow Forest,” a mystical story set in Siberia in the mid-20th century.
What happened next took Gilbert and much of the publishing world by surprise. When Riverhead announced the book, Gilbert was swiftly condemned by a faction of readers who said it was insensitive to set a novel in Siberia while Russia’s war in Ukraine was ongoing. Gilbert responded by posting an apology and indefinitely postponing the book — a decision that prompted another angry faction to condemn Gilbert for capitulating to an online mob.
Gilbert still hopes to release “The Snow Forest” someday, but feels that pulling it was the right call. “There was a lot of drama, and I’m trying very hard to live a drama-free life,” she said.
The controversy may have provided the accelerant Gilbert needed to tackle the book about Elias. By then, five years had passed since her death, and Gilbert was sober and felt she had the fortitude to tell the story. A few weeks after she postponed “The Snow Forest,” Gilbert started writing the memoir.
When she got to the part about Elias’s relapse, Gilbert stalled for months.
“I wasn’t sure I was up for it as a writer,” she said. She finally finished those chapters while staying in New Orleans, where she rented out a floor of the writer Sarah M. Broom’s house. It rained nearly every day, and Gilbert took long walks in the rain, often in tears.
“She’s fearless in certain ways,” said Broom, who read a draft of the book. “You don’t have the feeling that she’s hiding or holding on or overcrafting the narrative. She’s telling the story that she had to tell.”
Before submitting the manuscript to her publisher, she shared it with Elias’s family.
Their reactions were mixed. Elias’s nephew, Sami Jano, who was close to his aunt, said Gilbert captured Elias’s charisma and complexities, as well as revealing her own flaws.
“Liz, despite her flowery disposition to the world and her ‘improve yourself’ message, she can get dark,” he said.
Some other family members objected to parts of the book. In an interview, Elias’s sister, who is not named in the book and requested that her name be withheld to speak about sensitive family matters, questioned some of the details, particularly the timeline of when Elias began to relapse, and said other parts felt embellished and exploitative, like when Gilbert detailed all the money she spent on Elias.
“We all knew from Day 1 that a book was going to be written and money was going to be made out of my sister’s death,” she said. “To me, Rayya should not be on display.”
Gilbert recognizes that this story clashes with the version of herself she’s put forth previously. But there’s a good reason for the discrepancies, she said — she’s not the same person she was when she wrote “Eat, Pray, Love.”
She also seems unconcerned with how her readers, who are accustomed to Gilbert as a buoyant dispenser of wit and wisdom, will react to a story about addiction, betrayal and obsession that borders on mania.
“I guess they’ll have to decide, right?” she said brightly, then laughed long and hard.
Alexandra Alter writes about books, publishing and the literary world for The Times.
The post Elizabeth Gilbert Gets Dark appeared first on New York Times.
