Review of Elizabeth Gilbert's All the Way to the River
Love, Loss and Liberation
Elizabeth Gilbert was my favorite author even before Eat Pray Love made her rich and famous. I devoured her earlier memoir The Last American Man (memoirs are my thing) and of course I loved Eat Pray Love along with millions of others. But her latest book, All the Way to the River: Love, Loss and Liberation, absolutely blew my mind.
This is Gilbert’s most powerful and socially relevant work yet. It’s about her lifetime sex and love addiction, told through the story of her ten-year friendship with Rayva, her hairdresser who became her closest companion and eventually her lover. Gilbert gave Rayva a house rent-free, encouraged her writing, and when Rayva was diagnosed with terminal cancer—six months to live, her liver ravaged by prior addictions and years of alcohol abuse—Gilbert left her husband and went to be with her.
The first months were ecstatic. Then Rayva relapsed. It started small: “bitters” which (according to Rayva) contained no alcohol. Then came the cocaine, the pills, the full descent. And here’s where Gilbert’s codependence revealed itself in all its ugly glory. She paid for everything. She enabled everything. She lost her mind.
The most harrowing scene in the book is when Gilbert plans to kill Rayva. Actually contemplates murder. Rayva, who despite her addiction remained a relational genius, immediately sensed it. The “intervention” that followed—told in tragic-comic detail—was a masterclass in unskillfulness. When Rayva told Gilbert she had “thrown herself at her,” it wounded Gilbert so deeply she went into complete emotional withdrawal. They did not see each other for months.
Eventually, they meet again at the home of the friend who took Rayva in during her final months. Gilbert becomes a crucial presence at Rayva’s deathbed — a service of love, grief, and cosmic reckoning.
And then Gilbert did something even more radical: she stopped all romantic relationships, shaved her head, stopped drinking and all drugs, and spent the next five years in 12-step recovery. WOW. The memoir ends with Gilbert discovering – for the first time in her life – the benefits of being alone. Including the karmic near-miss of her ending her “sobriety” with a man she was intensely attracted to, only to discover later that he was married.
The book is both hilarious and very moving in places. Gilbert captures the absurdity of recovery meetings, the insanity of her entering a full-blown “junkie” lifestyle (despite being a world-famous writer), her eventual choice between healing and maintaining anonymity. More than anything, I am left with the “aliveness” and intensity of addict relationships and addict lifestyle – which of course I relate to very strongly. It’s not all craziness; there is love and humor and fun there. The “humanity” of it is touching and beautiful. This is addiction as teacher, trauma as doorway, love as demolition. Gilbert went all the way down and came back. And she won against her addiction, which is truly extraordinary.
But my biggest revelation – with profound impact on my own turbulent marriage – was this: relationships don’t work without God. I’m skeptical of 12-step programs in general (my story is that the deep we-space facilitated by Authentic Relating is a superior transformational modality), but they clearly worked for Gilbert. Her willingness to surrender to something larger than herself, to acknowledge her powerlessness over her patterns, to seek healing through spiritual practice—this is what saved her. Perhaps the deep we-space is not enough: you need to acknowledge, and then surrender, to something larger than yourself. Perhaps you need God.
PS: Gilbert is now 56 and very prolific. I can’t imagine what she will come up with next, or whether she could ever write anything else as good and as socially significant. To my mind, this book raises her from one of the best modern writers to guru status.
To read the larger context of how this books fits within my current life and development, read my previous article The Bipolar Writer’s Life: Notes from the Berlin Underground.