Elizabeth Gilbert insists her new book, “All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation,” is a memoir. “I’m not a spokesperson for any particular program; this is a memoir about my own experience,” she told Dan Harris of the “10 Percent Happier” podcast.
Immediately after that disclaimer, the “Eat, Pray, Love” author talks about how 12-step programs were what transformed her consciousness and got her to address her sex and love addiction, and how therapy didn’t really work for her. “If you’re going to compare how old therapy and psychology are, compared to how old some of these spiritual practices are, you know, one of them’s got legs. Psychology is pretty new, and meditation and prayer are ancient.”
Listening to this scattered yet didactic interview was a similar experience to reading the book. “All the Way to the River” is about Gilbert’s torrid relationship with her best friend, the musician and hairdresser Rayya Elias. Gilbert realizes she is madly in love with Elias just as Elias finds out that she has terminal cancer. Gilbert leaves her husband for Elias, who has a long history of substance abuse. Faced with the news that Elias has six months to live, Gilbert falls into a hedonistic, drug-addled spiral with her.
Throughout the book — which is a combination of self-help, poetry and memoir — Gilbert keeps telling readers what they should think and how they should feel. She can’t help shifting into spiritual counselor mode and universalizing her own unusual experiences of relationships and grief. “What we commonly call an ‘addict,’ I believe, is just an exaggerated version of all of us,” she insists in the introduction. “I suspect, at some level, that I might be you, and that you might be me, and that all of us might be Rayya.”
On a basic level, yes, we are all human beings deserving of love and care, but it does a disservice to the reality and science of substance abuse addiction, which is “a treatable, chronic medical disease,” to muddy the definition this way.
We can empathize with a writer’s darkest struggles without labeling them or implying that everyone experiences life the same way. And there are so many labels in this book. There’s a short chapter with a pages-long definition of codependency, a term mentioned dozens of times throughout the text. “Attachment styles” are tossed around; so are jargony terms like “enmeshed” and “unboundaried” and “unhealed trauma.”
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The post Elizabeth Gilbert Can’t Control the Narrative appeared first on New York Times.
