09/01/2025
Upon hearing that Elizabeth Gilbert has written another memoir, readers may imagine that they’re in for the type of adventure and revelation found in the pages of “Eat, Pray, Love,” her first wildly successful foray into the form. But her new book, “All the Way to the River,” delivers something different. Gilbert tells the story of her love affair with her best friend, Rayya, whom she became involved with after Rayya was diagnosed with liver and pancreatic cancer. When Rayya refuses chemo, Gilbert rents her a penthouse, then starts buying her things: a Range Rover, a piano, a Rolex. Together, they gorge on food, s*x, travel, pleasure. Then Rayya’s friends persuade her to do chemo after all, and her illness and the treatment together become so monstrously debilitating that she decides she needs both an hourly supply of opiates and a mountain of co***ne. These Gilbert pays for and procures.
“Those who follow Gilbert on social media will know the broad outlines of the Rayya story,” Jia Tolentino writes, “but the most dire moments in the memoir were not previously public, and those moments make the book’s self-help framework seem both unnecessary—who could possibly stop reading this?—and wildly mismatched.” The “Eat, Pray, Love” paradigm always rested on the premise that Gilbert, a woman who is profoundly and obviously exceptional, could function as a blueprint for the ordinary woman, Tolentino continues. “This notion may have finally reached its end point.” Read her review of Gilbert’s new memoir: https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/Sv-ZpK
