All the Way to the River
By Elizabeth Gilbert
Riverhead Books
380 pages
In 2006, unhappy, privileged women everywhere found solace in a new memoir about another unhappy, privileged woman who found happiness after a year of travel and soul searching. Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat Pray Love” became a cultural phenomenon, resonating with the Oprah crowd, offering hope they could also achieve their own happy endings. I was one of them.
The thing about happy endings is that they’re supposed to be final. But in Gilbert’s latest memoir, “All the Way to the River,” we learn that “Eat Pray Love” was not about her happy ending. In fact, we learn that the loving “Eat Pray Love” husband she was rewarded with at the end of the book was not even the love of her life. That honor would go to her long-term best friend Rayya Elias, for whom Gilbert left her husband in 2016 upon learning she was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
Longterm fans, like myself, followed this next romantic saga of Gilbert’s life through her social media, interviews and talks. We followed the passionate but tragic love affair as the pair made the best of Elias’ final months, including a touching commitment ceremony and creating as much art and music as possible.
In theory, it was a beautiful love story about soulmates finally finding each other late in life, making the most of the precious time they have left together, a romance for the ages.
Turns out, it was a lot messier than that. Like on the verge of murder messy. Literally.
That is what we learn in “All the Way to the River,” which chronicles Gilbert's and Elias’ brief but powerful love story, which ended in early 2019, and what happened after.
More than a love story, “All the Way to the River” is about addiction and recovery. It was no secret Elias was a former drug addict, whose addiction often left her homeless and in and out of jail. She had been sober for three years when she met Gilbert, which would last until the rest of her life – almost.
What we didn’t know – at least to this extent – was that Gilbert is an addict herself, but a sex and love addict. As she describes at length in her book, sex and love addicts are not dissimilar to other kinds of addicts, except they get high on the infatuation of new romantic relationships. They use people to dull the pain of their realities, pouring everything they have into the fantasy of this person before burning out, now lost and abandoned.
To get a sense of the extremity of this behavior, the rules of Gilbert’s “sober dating plan” in recovery include no weeklong first dates, no moving virtual strangers into her home, no trying to rescue unrecovered addicts, and no sharing bank accounts.
This is clearly not normal infatuation.
And when those addicts come together, all hell breaks loose.
Gilbert's and Elias’ relationship was different from the burnout relationships Gilbert references. The pair had been friends for 16 years when they got together and were practically inseparable in the years leading up to it. Gilbert said she had been slowly falling in love with Elias for years but buried those feelings because she wanted to remain faithful in her otherwise happy marriage. But when she learned of her best friend’s impending doom, those feelings could no longer be contained. In fact, they apparently weren’t that well contained to begin with, with her patient husband acknowledging he knew she had been in love with Elias for years.
For the first few months, Gilbert and Elias did have a passionate, beautiful love story, with Gilbert pouring everything she had into making the most of their time together.
But when Elias’ cancer pain got unbearable, her doctor prescribed opiates. What started as one pill a day, to two pills a day to handfuls at a time, brought the dragon back with a vengeance. Soon their apartment was full of opiates, cocaine, sleeping pills and benzos.
Elias – whom Gilbert described as being the only person who made her feel safe – was now verbally abusive and manipulative, demanding she cater to her every toxic need at her own expense.
At her lowest point, Gilbert describes taking some of Elias’ pills to the park with the full intention of switching them to kill her – a jaw-dropping moment for anyone familiar with the “nice lady who wrote ‘Eat Pray Love’” (as she has sometimes refers to herself). When an astute Elias picks up on that, Gilbert decides it is time for a break and a time to seek help.
This is where the recovery portion of the story begins. Ironically, through Elias’ pre-relapse advice, Gilbert was able to find the strength to leave her partner, finding additional encouragement through support groups. Elias, now incentivized, found her own path to recovery from a close friend who knew how to handle her addiction. Our main pair eventually found their way back together, and Elias died surrounded by the people she loved.
Gilbert’s story doesn’t end there. Through her grief, Gilbert throws herself into her work, then back into a series of toxic relationships before finally realizing the depth of her sex and love addiction and rejoining the support groups, this time in earnest and with success.
Like “Eat Pray Love,” “All the Way to the River” is a story about one woman’s journey to peace and happiness. While Gilbert admits she did find that through “Eat Pray Love,” she lacked the support network she has now to keep her from sliding back into her old habits.
Unlike in “Eat Pray Love,” this did not result in finding love again. Instead, she is at solace with herself with no intention of dating again unless called upon by the universe. As she says in her book, “My ultimate goal in recovery is not to end up in a healthy relationship with the perfect partner; my ultimate goal in recovery is to end up in a healthy relationship with myself.”
When I first read “Eat Pray Love,” I connected with Gilbert. I was fresh out of college, lost, knowing only that I wanted to travel and be happy. She got me, she was me, just at a different time in a different place. But I don’t see myself in the Gilbert of “Eat Pray Love,” which is not necessarily a bad thing.
I don’t relate to that kind of addiction. While I know current and former alcoholics and drug addicts, it has never been to the extreme of Gilbert’s experiences, nor have I ever been anyone’s caretaker.
From this perspective, “All the Way to the River” is an enlightening look into the ravages of addiction and the unspoken personal cost of caretaking, especially its accompanying agonizing resentment and guilt. It is also hopeful for anyone struggling with this themselves – addiction or loving an addict – and a testament to the power of 12-step recovery programs and a support network of those who have taken this path before. To that point, the frequency and length to which Gilbert describes addiction and recovery are quite heavy-handed and could have benefited from some editing.
In classic Gilbert style, “All the Way to the River” is insightful, approachable, hopeful, and funny. Her prose is poetic, yet rarely predictable. Her frequent self-deprecating humor is charming and eases the gravity of an otherwise dire subject matter. She paints a vivid slice of her reality – and the reality of so many others – to readers who have been fortunate to have avoided those experiences. And for those who have struggled with addiction and caretaking, it offers encouragement and compassion, a safe space to release complicated feelings, and clear guidance on how to cope with, and hopefully, eventually triumph.
