Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | September 16, 2025
Elizabeth Gilbert seemed like someone who had all the answers. Her memoir-slash-guru guidance book Eat Pray Love was a massive bestseller and true cultural moment. Gilbert followed that up with some acclaimed novels but was largely known for her Oprah-endorsed brand of New Age-adjacent self-improvement philosophies. She did TED Talks, podcasts, public speaking gigs, and all manner of for-profit content designed to help you live your best, most authentic life. As her newest book, All the Way to the River, reveals, her brand wasn’t entirely honest. But now she’s laying it all out on the table. Sort of.
The pre-release hype and shock around All the Way to the River has been intense. How could it not be when Gilbert unveiled how much she’d gone through? In 2016, Gilbert announced that she had separated from the man whom she met and married after Eat Pray Love. Shortly afterward, she added that she was in a relationship with her female best friend, writer Rayya Elias, and that Elias had terminal cancer. Elias, a musician and hairdresser who wrote her own memoir, passed away in January 2018. Now, Gilbert has admitted that her grand love story had a few kinks in it, mainly drug addiction, co-dependency, and a brief but cancelled murder scheme.
Gilbert’s newest book is simultaneously a love letter and a razing to the ground of her own delusions. She admits that she is a long-time love and sex addict who cannot have a normal relationship because she becomes too obsessed with those she attaches herself to. She wants to take care of them, flinging her immense wealth their way and providing shelter in her grand home. This is something she’d talked about before, in a 2015 article for The New York Times titled ‘Confessions of a Seduction Addict.’ She said that she ‘careened from one intimate entanglement to the next—dozens of them—without so much as a day off between romances.’ This started before she confessed her love to Elias, her hairdresser turned friend, but it was through this person that she sank to a new low. And what we get is, well, kind of the worst?
Look, Gilbert’s whole shtick is decidedly not for me. When I read this book amid the throes of jetlag, I knew that my cynicism would probably colour my impression of it. Eat Pray Love is a fascinatingly cynical book. Gilbert includes within its pages the calculated way she secured a large publishing advance to fund its existence and the lavish holidays it required. Maybe she didn’t foresee the book selling the many millions of copies that it did and becoming the 2000s’ most talked-about woo-woo memoir, but she was certainly savvy enough to know how to mould her tale into something with immense mainstream appeal. That book became Oprah’s bible because it was calculated to be pleasing. It’s part beach read, part self-help, part memoir, and all through the lens of a rom-com that promises to heal.
This puts All the Way to the River in an intriguing spot. Since Eat Pray Love, Gilbert has written non-fiction but largely focused on acclaimed novels that offer her more room for flinty nuances. With this, she’s seeking to offer the ‘truth’ of her own heavily varnished brand. See, even the woman who ‘had it all’ didn’t really. So relatable, yes? But even in this moment of so-called liberation, Gilbert cannot help but try to frame her lowest moments, and those of a woman no longer here to tell her story, as lessons for the world to learn.
This is an extremely woo-woo book. It opens with Gilbert describing how she was awoken one night, years after Rayaa’s death, by her spirit commanding her to write a book about their story. I’m not religious and it’s not my place to refute someone’s experiences in this realm. Opening up your book like this, though, feels like poor justification for its existence. No amount of talk of God or the grand forces of the universe feels tangible enough for the reader as Gilbert offers ‘radical honesty.’ Because it wasn’t honest enough in the first bestselling book. Will it be even more honest in her next title? Such is the conundrum of the self-improvement manifesto — you have to keep them coming, even if it defeats the purpose.
The most intriguing stuff in All the Way to the River is also the toughest to read. This is a love story, but also one of pure toxicity. Rayaa, through Gilbert’s eyes, was a hurricane of a person: a Syrian-American who grew up in Detroit and left home to become a punk before sinking into hardcore drug addiction, then getting clean and becoming a free spirit in a bleak world. She’s profane, hates any kind of dishonesty, and could charm anyone into submission. Gilbert, by her own admission, became increasingly enamoured with her acquaintance until they were the closest of friends, and everyone around them joked that they were soulmates. When she received her terminal diagnosis, Gilbert realized she hadn’t a moment to waste. She left her husband (amicably, we’re told) and immediately gave everything of herself over to caring for Rayaa.
She couldn’t deny her anything, so blind to her obvious struggles as she was due to her love addiction. When Rayaa decided to commit to the relapse to end all relapses, Gilbert joined in. They popped pills, smoked, snorted, and drank themselves into a spell of what seemed to be apocalyptic intoxication. After all, Rayaa was already dying so why not indulge? But she was also, according to Gilbert, a mean junkie, and as she committed to full-on opioid use, she became nastier and less in control of herself. Gilbert enabled her because that was what lovers did, surely? You’ll pull your hair out reading moments like Gilbert registering as an intravenous drug user so she can claim access to fresh needles at the free clinic, but Gilbert is doing the same with herself. Addiction in any form makes you into both an idiot and an annoying twerp.
But then there are moments like that now-viral revelation that Gilbert took serious steps to plan the murder of Rayaa. She went through the process of picking out a murder weapon (morphine pills and fentanyl patches) and figuring out how to trick her still-wily and now-paranoid addict partner into going gently into that good night. It’s the nadir of Gilbert’s self-loathing and co-dependency, the moment where she has to walk away from her dying addict girlfriend. Honest? I suppose so.
Frankly, it’s hard to escape the sense that this book probably shouldn’t have been written. Maybe Elias’s ghost truly did give Gilbert permission to tell all, but the exposure of the stripping away of her dignity in the last months of her life in the name of ‘radical honesty’ cannot help but ring hollow. It’s ghoulish and not helpful. The matter feels queasier given that Gilbert is much more respectful of others and her own privacy in moments where context would have been crucial. She doesn’t tell all about her ex-husband, and she says she doesn’t want to relive her darkest moments with psychedelic drug use after Elias’s death. Sure, that’s her prerogative, but how can one claim true openness when she’s willing to close her own doors but not those of her late lover’s?
There are moments of real pain here. How could there not be when we’re dealing with things as overwhelming as drug addiction and terminal cancer? But Gilbert doesn’t seem to know how to write any of this without positioning it as a life lesson for us, her dear readers. You too can find emotional and spiritual growth through Gilbert detailing how her lover started injecting cocaine into her toes! Gilbert cannot help but use the tritest therapy speak for moments that cry out for clarity or unpolished grime. When she breaks up with the dying Rayaa in the hopes that it’ll get her clean, she talks to her in an endless spiel of Tumblr quotes. Maybe that’s how the conversation really went. Still, it reads as phony from snout to tail. A lot of the book does when Gilbert slides into that Eat Pray Love mode of Pinterest board-friendly speechifying (and some truly terrible poetry).
I’m not sure Elizabeth Gilbert knows how not to make her own life into content. Isn’t that the plight of many a writer, to forever mine your own darkness and troubles for virality and audience interest? And why would she stop when it’s made her rich? Towards the end of the book, she admits that her finances were drained in part because of the cost of caring for Rayaa. This new book has the Oprah endorsement and publisher push to be another hit, and it’s certainly written to be as sellable as possible. The downside is that it makes everything in the book feel askew. How radical is one’s honesty when it’s forever contextualized as a shareable quote for social media?
All the Way to the River is available to buy in bookshops and online now.
