Author Elizabeth Gilbert lays it all out at the start of her new memoir, All the Way to the River:
“This book … is my very best effort to tell the truth about what happened between me and Rayya Elias — our friendship, our romance, our beauty, rage, and pain,” Gilbert writes. “It tells the story of Rayya’s addiction, her relapse, and her death. It also tells the story of my own addiction and my eventual surrender into recovery.”
Gilbert is best known for a very different memoir, written what seems like a lifetime ago: the 2006 best-seller, Eat, Pray, Love. A lot has happened to the author since that iconic journey around the world and its subsequent movie adaptation starring Julia Roberts. Most notably, the passionate friendship-turned-love-affair with a woman she met as a hairdresser in 2002.
Shortly after Elias was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2016, the author announced that her marriage was over and that she’d found love with her longtime best friend, Rayya Elias. Elias was a musician, writer, filmmaker, former punk rocker and recovering drug addict, and as Gilbert describes it, “a legend to all who knew her.”
Gilbert says the title of All the Way to the River was inspired by the way Elias used a map of New York City as a metaphor for her relationships. First, you’ve got your Fifth Avenue friends, who are right in the center of the map. These are purely superficial friends or professional contacts. You don’t really know them, and they don’t know you. As you move farther east, you have your Second and First Avenue friends, who are more honest and vulnerable with one another. Farther still are the friends on Avenue A, B, C, or D, who maybe paid your bail or took you to rehab.
And if you’re really lucky, Elias explained, you might find one friend who will walk all the way to the East River with you. This is the friend who knows everything, the one you call when you have nowhere else to turn. Gilbert and Elias were “all-the-way-to-the-river friends.” When they discovered Elias was dying, they began to refer to her death as “the river.”
The walk to that river was dark and painful, and Gilbert pulls no punches in revealing every excruciating detail. Elias fell back into a full-blown addiction to numerous substances, and a codependent Gilbert reached a point so low that she actually contemplated murdering her. That’s when the author got honest about her sex and love addiction and her own role in her partner’s life and death.
All the Way to the River is an impressive mashup of Gilbert’s candid storytelling, along with poems, drawings, prayers and doodles that she crafted during her recovery.
“It’s a perilous journey … to be somebody’s ‘all the way to the river’ relationship,” Gilbert writes. “There is romance in it, but also danger. Intimacy at that level is rough.”
Anyone who has followed Gilbert’s career from Eat, Pray, Love to her most recent (and surprisingly upbeat) novel, City of Girls, will likely appreciate this new memoir. It features the author’s winsome charm despite the somber content, and it explains what has been a confusing several years for fans who follow Gilbert on social media. It even explains the buzz-cut hair.
