There’s no better way to welcome fall than with a book you can’t put down, and Oprah’s latest selection promises to keep readers hooked—and give us plenty to talk about. All the Way to the River is the latest memoir by Elizabeth Gilbert, the bestselling author best known for her 2006 phenomenon, Eat Pray Love. With the same emotional transparency and captivating voice that made her famous, Gilbert now tells a much heavier story of falling in love—and eventually, into mutual active addiction—with her terminally ill best friend.
“With Eat Pray Love, Elizabeth Gilbert started a movement,” says Oprah Winfrey. “This new memoir is just as powerful—raw, unflinching, and deeply healing. She bares her soul, sharing her truth so openly, she offers readers the courage to face their own.”
Gilbert appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2007 to discuss Eat Pray Love—which Oprah called “a modern woman’s bible”—and again to discuss the book’s lasting impact and film adaptation. Still, nothing can prepare an author for the honor of getting the phone call. “Oprah completely surprised me with a phone call saying that she had chosen All the Way to the River for her Book Club,” Gilbert recalls. “I’d been told by my publisher to expect a phone call at a certain time and date that week, but I thought I was going to be talking to my editor about book business. Instead, when I picked up the phone, there was that unmistakable voice, Ms. Winfrey herself, saying that she loved my memoir and believed that it would ‘set people free.’” You’d think someone who’d been played by Julia Roberts would be hard to sweep off her feet, but Gilbert admits that she “felt like a teenager” when she got the news of the Book Club selection, adding, “the honor is astonishing and extraordinary. I aim to be worthy of her faith in my work.”
Oprah and Gilbert recently discussed All the Way to the River over pumpkin spice lattes at a Starbucks café in Seattle. Along with a live audience of readers, the two dug into the book’s themes of addiction, grief, codependency, and the thin line between self-discovery and self-destruction. You can watch the entire conversation right now for free on Oprah’s YouTube channel or on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation, by Elizabeth Gilbert
Charley Burlock is the Books Editor at Oprah Daily where she writes, edits, and assigns stories on all things literary. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from NYU, where she also taught undergraduate creative writing. Her work has been featured in the Atlantic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Hyperallergic, the Apple News Today podcast, and elsewhere. You can read her writing at charleyburlock.com.