Connecticut native and bestselling author Elizabeth Gilbert’s new memoir, “All the Way to the River,” tells the story of her late partner, Rayya Elias.
The two began as fast friends, then fell in love. But as they faced a terminal cancer diagnosis, both faced a renewed struggle with addiction.
Elizabeth Gilbert recently joined Connecticut Public’s “Where We Live” to talk about Rayya – “the love of her life” – and what she discovered about herself, about love and about the sanctity of truth in writing this deeply personal memoir. She’ll speak at an event in Torrington on Sept. 19.
Gilbert is the author of the international bestseller “Eat, Pray, Love” and several other books, including “The Signature of All Things” and “City of Girls.”
Interview highlights
New memoir a ‘forensic exploration of love’
This was my best friend, Rayya Elias, and over the course of almost 20 years of knowing each other, we moved through different levels of relationship. We started as hairdresser and client. Then, we became social friends, and then we became closer friends, and then we became neighbors. And then, we became muse and artist, in both directions.
Then we became, what I can only call, each other's person. Only very late, at the very end of the game, a year-and-a-half before she died, she was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic and liver cancer. It was the shock of that terminal cancer diagnosis that propelled us to become lovers.
‘We sank to the lowest lows’
Rayya was a heroin addict, a recovered heroin and cocaine addict, who had spent many years off of drugs, but when the pain and the fear of cancer caught up with her, she returned to that in a big way. She had a major, major, relapse into extreme, active drug addiction.
I was an unhealed, codependent enabler who also went to the lowest and most degraded version of myself at the end of her life. I turned into somebody who was allowing myself to be treated abusively and who was allowing her to treat herself abusively, and who's paying for all the drugs.
We soared to the highest heights and we sank to the lowest lows, and then she died. I was left with just this sort of infinite question, like, what happened? And so the book is sort of like slowing down that story, beat by beat.
‘Paradoxes that she contained’
This was the person who I knew, when she was in her sobriety, was the most grounded person I had ever met. She was the most intensely anchored, foundationally reassuring, safe, honest and stabilizing presence that I had ever encountered. That's why I fell in love with her.
When the wheels came off and she returned to that more degraded version of herself, she was kind of a monster. And so I had been left with this really, really destabilizing set of questions, like, this is the person I thought I knew the best in the entire world, and now I don't know whether I knew that person at all.
Like many people, I prefer people to be simpler than they are. And we aren't. I also found in the writing of that book, my own darkness and my own unhealed wounds that caused me to behave in ways that were very far from my integrity.
On Gilbert’s own darkness
I would say I did this uninterruptedly for 35 years – starting very early around the age of 14 – I would latch into another person with the hope they were going to save me. I would exchange sex for a sense of security that I could not generate within myself.
I think a lot of people do that, and I think a lot of women do that. Because it's the only way to get to that feeling of security, or to control somebody in order to make them love you, right?
And because that high doesn't last, I would just go find someone else, and then I would find someone else. And I only did that about 40 or 50 times.
When a friend of mine, who was in 12-step recovery for alcohol addiction, finally sat me down after watching me do that – she had been in my life for 20 years — and said, ‘This looks a lot like sex and love addiction.’ That's when my life began to change.
My goal is no longer to have a healthy and satisfying sexual and romantic relationship with somebody. That was my goal my entire life. My goal is to have a healthy and satisfying relationship with myself, with my higher power, with everyone around me, and with the world at large and with my own existence.
On returning to Connecticut
When I say I'm going home, I mean Connecticut. What I picture is my parents’ Christmas tree farm, where I was raised in Litchfield, which they still, astonishingly, have into their 80s.
My parents are, in so many ways, the opposite of me. They're people who are very grounded in agricultural cycles and very rooted in place.
They've lived in that house, I think it's been 51 years at this point. I've probably lived in 50 places in the last 20 years and don't show any signs of fully settling down, ever.
My parents don't change. Their land doesn't change, their rhythms don't change, the woods where I grew up don't change. I kind of like that nothing here changes.
On the ‘immense discipline’ of growing up on a farm
Growing up on a farm taught me immense discipline and a sense of responsibility. It gives me the discipline to be able to write, and that requires farmers’ hours, essentially, and farmers’ discipline. I'm trained to get up early in the morning and to work hard.
I think that does have something to do with the land where [my parents] lived, because it wasn't easy land. Northwestern Connecticut is hilly and rocky and if you want to pull something out of that land – you have to make it work.
Listen to the full episode
CT native Elizabeth Gilbert reflects on love and loss in new memoir 'All the Way to the River'
Gilbert is scheduled to appear live in Torrington, Connecticut, on Sept. 19, at the Warner Theatre. Ticket information is available here.
This interview has been edited and condensed. Connecticut Public’s Catherine Shen, Chloe Wynne and Patrick Skahill contributed to this report.
