If you are someone who reads multiple news sources a day, a fun way to occasionally spend your time over the last few weeks would have been to watch how critics and commentators have grappled with a hard problem. It is not, admittedly, as hard as the problem of grappling with consciousness. But it is hard enough that the famous assurance by Glennon Doyle, lifestyle coach and thought leader, that “we can do hard things,” remains relevant. I am talking about the problem of how we talk about All the Way to the River, Elizabeth Gilbert’s new memoir – specifically, how to be kinder and more measured about it than the book really deserves.
As you may know if you are one of the 30 million people who bought Eat Pray Love, one of the tens of millions who have read Big Magic or one of her other novels, or simply one of her 1.2 million followers on Instagram, Gilbert recently published a memoir that tells the story of the final years of Rayya Elias, a 57-year-old hair stylist who died of cancer in 2018. This was the woman for whom Gilbert left her husband – the one she met in Bali at the end of the first memoir – and with whom she descended into a drug-addled nightmare after Elias’s diagnosis. It is a horrific tale, one in which Gilbert watches, sometimes helpless, sometimes enabling, as Elias spirals into paranoia and addiction and drags the boundary-less Gilbert down with her. It is also an awesomely, breathtakingly, jaw-droppingly bad book.
Even the most successful authors can misfire, and All the Way to the River would be unremarkable if it weren’t for the fact that, to date, Gilbert’s instincts have always been so on the money. In terms of writing, she is vastly more talented than most operators in the female-empowerment space – the ones who tell us to be vulnerable, and the ones who advise us that the main thing is to have “grit” and the ones who assure us we can do hard things. Gilbert has never quite fitted into this crowd, partly because she has a writing career beyond grifty self-help, and partly because she has always seemed to me to be a much harder-nosed and more interesting figure than those gals.
Big Magic, which counselled readers on how to have a creative life (and, by implication, how to become Liz Gilbert), is a perfectly wise book. Eat Pray Love is a pitch-perfect romcom. And while stylistically Gilbert can be as winsome as the next woman selling self-love, I’ve always been interested in the fact that she is about the only superstar creator of female inspo-content who doesn’t have children – not only that, but is matter-of-fact about never having wanted them. You have to tip your hat to Liz Gilbert, the woman is an absolute tank.
I mention all this because All the Way to the River, which opens with a long, imagined address to Gilbert by the late Elias and includes a claim by Gilbert that she is channelling the spirit of Elias’s dead mother (“my soul left my body so Georgette could be alone with her girl”), has proved hard to review, mainly, I suspect, because the author has so much goodwill in the bank. The phrase “raw honesty” gets a lot of outings, as does “bravery”, the word you use for a book you hated but is about painful things you feel guilty about trashing. This newspaper called the memoir a “solipsistic mess”, but also, “moving”, while the New York Times called it “excruciating”, then quickly stood down and settled on the quieter critique, “earnest, vulnerable but ultimately quite corny”.
For the author herself, the issue might have been one of what happens when you are your own source of material and that material starts to run thin. In the past, Gilbert has been quite honest about how calculating she is in her search for material. In her 20s, for example, she got a job at the grunge bar Coyote Ugly in downtown New York precisely so she could write about it. (The experience became a long magazine piece in GQ, then a movie.) There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s what hacks do and she is better at it than anyone.
This time, Gilbert seems to have gone a step further. When she met Rayya, Gilbert describes herself in the book as looking like a “sales clerk at Banana Republic”. Seven years after Rayya’s death and the author is pictured everywhere in a sleeveless jumpsuit, hair shaven, skin pierced and tattooed, a style she admits she picked up from her late girlfriend and that makes her many degrees better dressed than she used to be. But to this lesbian’s eyes it’s an odd piece of appropriation that on a latterly straight woman with a wardrobe from Banana Republic looks like someone who has shown up to Halloween in a lesbian costume.
The tribute is, I’m sure, lovingly intended, but from the outside it looks like cosplay and seems to me at odds with Gilbert’s steely persona. On the other hand, the book went straight in at number two on the New York Times chart this month, so – and I mean this – not only good luck to her, but perhaps as usual, she knows precisely what she is doing.
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Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
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