Two years ago, I lost my five-year-old niece Emily to neuroblastoma: a rare and aggressive childhood cancer with one of the longest, most aggressive, and most toxic treatment protocols of any paediatric cancer.
For six months, I sat with Emily through multiple rounds of chemotherapy, wondering how one could ever describe the experience of cancer. A number of words came to me. “Excitement”, “joy” and “a sense of euphoria” were not among them.
This is how New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth Gilbert describes the period following the diagnosis of her long-time friend – and, in her final days, partner – Rayya Elias, after Rayya was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic and liver cancer in April 2016, at the age of 56.
“What I remember most about that time,” Gilbert writes, “is how electric I felt. My entire body and imagination were thrumming with the prospect of living without any limits or rules whatsoever – of doing whatever the hell we wanted; of burning up the last few months of Rayya’s life.”
The admission, from Gilbert’s new memoir All the Way to the River, is as bizarre as it is bewildering.
Bloomsbury
Marketed – predictably – as “a story of love, loss and liberation”, and lauded by Oprah as “the bravest thing [she’s] ever read”, the memoir tells the story of Gilbert’s decision to leave her second husband for her dying best friend – her “literal ride or die lover”.
The book – which reads like an extension of Gilbert’s Substack Letters from Love – is her first major confessional memoir since the 2006 publishing sensation and cultural phenomenon Eat, Pray, Love. (Committed, her 2010 meditation on the institution of marriage, was framed as a sequel, but blended memoir with cultural history.)
In Eat Pray Love, which has sold over 30 million copies and been translated into more than 30 languages, Gilbert presented herself as an “everyday” woman who, reeling from a contentious divorce, took off around the world in search of “everything”. (Andrew Gottlieb’s 2009 parody Drink, Play, F@#k sold itself as “one man’s search for anything.”)
In All the Way to the River – a book that could just as easily be titled All the Way to the Bank – Gilbert repositions herself as a spiritual teacher of sorts, interweaving reflections on love and addiction with amateur poetry, doodles and handwritten affirmations: “Surrender your why,” she writes. “What hurts you blesses you. Darkness is your candle.”
The result is a collection of self-help cliches dressed up as wisdom, structured through a series of Instagram-style vignettes with titles so earnest they verge on parody: “I belong here”, “Who will be my home?”, “What’s water?”.
Like Eat, Pray, Love before it, All the Way to the River is a textbook example of priv-lit.
Wealthy, whiny and white
Privileged literature, or priv-lit, was first defined in 2010 by writers Joshunda Sanders and Diana Barnes-Brown, in an article titled Eat, Pray, Spend, in the now defunct Bitch magazine.
Priv-lit, as the pair explained, refers to “literature or media whose expressed goal is one of spiritual, existential, or philosophical enlightenment contingent upon women’s hard work, commitment, and patience, but whose actual barriers to entry are primarily financial”.
Pre-diagnosis, Rayya was a New York hairdresser who handled Liz’s “duck fluff” hair (and who supposedly saw “a big circle of golden light” around Liz’s head the first time they met). After “twenty years of terrific haircuts”, Rayya became Liz’s confidant, neighbour and eventual best friend – slowly morphing into something Gilbert “did not have words for” as a happily married woman who was “trying to be good”.
When Rayya moved out of her Chelsea apartment post-divorce, Gilbert – a self-described “over-giver” – offered her a deconsecrated church she had purchased on Craigslist, “sight unseen”, from an internet café in Laos, initially for a few months. To extend her friend’s stay, in lieu of rent, Gilbert asked Rayya to write a memoir. The result, Harley Loco (2013), is an unsparing portrait of addiction published by Gilbert’s publisher, Bloomsbury, and generally well received.
The moment Rayya was diagnosed, Liz realised she was in love with her – and that her nine-year marriage to the Brazilian man she met in Eat, Pray Love – was over: “Everything would have to change now. Everything would have to be confessed.” Rayya, too, had an instant epiphany – she was in love with Liz: “I feel like a cage just opened in my heart, and a thousand white doves flew out.”
Instead of pursuing treatment – a decision Gilbert supported – Rayya experienced an “unrestrained esctasy” at the clarity and simplicity of her terminal diagnosis, telling Liz: “Let’s just blaze out … let’s just live balls to the wall until I die!”.
In the six months that followed, the pair embarked on a deranged, drug-fuelled bender during which Rayya, a former heroin addict, became increasingly volatile and unwell, and Liz, a self-proclaimed sex and love addict, desperately tried to care for Rayya by emotionally overcompensating and showering her with lavish gifts – a Range Rover, piano, and Rolex; a penthouse rental in the East Village (Rayya’s dream home); recording sessions in Detroit and New York.
This consumption-driven model of wellness – defined by reckless spending and material excess, all cloaked in the language of self-empowerment – positions Gilbert as both unmistakably privileged and profoundly unhinged, embodying the heart of priv-lit.
“Do you remember all those glittering nights?”, Rayya’s nephew recalled of the “consequence-free excitement” that preceded the crash. “Do you remember all those nights we went out to Sid Gold’s piano bar to do karaoke? All those incredible meals where no one cared about the cost?”
In one particularly excruciating scene, set during the 2008 stock market crash, Gilbert recounts how she walked down the main street of her New Jersey town, asking small-business owners if they needed 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!
Gilbert, to her credit, acknowledges “this was mania”. But this is not the first time her search for spiritual fulfilment and self-improvement has depended on “acts” of spending.
In Eat, Pray, Love, Gilbert – “on a voyage of self-discovery” – spent a year travelling three countries: Italy (to pursue the art of pleasure), India (to explore the art of devotion) and Indonesia (to learn the art of balancing both). Reflecting on her choices, she wrote, “It was only later, after admitting this dream, that I noticed the happy coincidence that all these countries began with the letter I.” (Later, with characteristic self-mockery, Gilbert quips that she could have gone to Ikea.)
Francois Duhamel/AAP
A tale of twin addictions
All the Way to the River is really a book about addiction.
Rayya was ostensibly 17 years sober when she and Liz got together. Liz is a co-dependent who has an unhealthy, excessive emotional and psychological reliance on others – she was, in her words, “an unhealed wound looking for someone to land on”.
When Liz gave Rayya her blessing to start drinking again, things quickly unravelled.
Months after her final dose of chemo, while in brutalising pain and “manic with distress”, Rayya accepted morphine – then escalated to fentanyl and finally added cocaine. Liz found herself at a needle exchange, registering as an intravenous drug user to obtain clean needles for Rayya, who, by this point, had transformed into “a venomous junkie”. Gilbert maintains this is her “most beautiful story”.
At the climax – in a scene that strains for sincerity – Gilbert confessed her foiled plan to murder Rayya by replacing her morphine with sleeping pills and covering her in fentanyl patches. (Earlier this month, Gilbert published a column in The Times sensationally titled “I came very close to murdering my partner”).
“She has to die now,” Gilbert thinks. “After all, Rayya was dying already, anyway, right? I just needed to move the process along before things got even worse.”
Even in a story that claims to be about addiction – “yours and mine” – Gilbert manages to make it all about herself: “I mean, my life was already destroyed, so why not finish the job?”.
Earlier, Gilbert tells her readers that “what Rayya wanted to do with the rest of her life – now that she knew her expiration date, as she kept calling it – was to spend every minute she could with me.”
She always walks the fine line between self-insight and self-preoccupation.
When I say that I once planned to murder Rayya, I don’t mean that the idea simply crossed my mind […] I mean that I fully intended to kill her. And I tell this story in all its raw honesty, because I want people to understand how insane co-dependency can make a person become. I mean, I’m the nice lady who wrote Eat, Pray, Love.
At its worst, the writing is saccharine, solipsistic and self-serving. At its best, the work is gripping and genuinely funny:
On the morning of my fifty-fourth birthday, I woke up at dawn and instantly realized that my partner, Rayya, was in the bedroom with me. This was an extremely impressive accomplishment on her part, because at that point she had been dead for more than five years.
Spiritual wisdom or self-serving junk
In everyday life, moments of personal revelation are common and often profound. As American psychologist Jerome Bruner reminds us, we rely on turning points to shape our identities and make sense of our lives.
But in literature, a narrative composed entirely of such epiphanies lacks suspense, credibility – and most crucially, emotional and thematic depth.
This is the fundamental problem with Elizabeth Gilbert’s nonfiction. The sense of perpetual becoming that defines her work – the fact she is always stepping into her power – reads more like a series of carefully curated Instagram posts than a fully formed narrative.
Writer and editor Annabel Nugent explains, “There is a cost to becoming a guru: your readers are no longer walking alongside you, but trailing behind picking up the breadcrumbs you’ve left in your wake.”
In All the Way to the River, Gilbert asks us to attend to our longings – to find the courage to listen to “the God of [our] understanding”, to start over or to stay.
But her decision to blow up her life (again) is far from inspirational. It’s tired, self-gratifying and unmistakably performative. It’s also characteristic of priv-lit.