First Impressions: All the Way to the River by Elizabeth Gilbert

Reading an author’s third memoir is like eating a delicious burger on an empty stomach. Eat, Pray, Love – the first one was an outstanding meal – one that I proclaimed to the world as the best thing in town. The second memoir, Committed, was wholesome and lovely – but you’ve eaten better offerings before. The third and latest memoir, All the way to the River, is a perfectly well-done dish. It’s just that now, your tummy is full. You’ve tasted other burgers elsewhere and you aren’t fooled by the cookery that passes off an ultra-stylistic burger as ‘rustic’.

Is it a good book? Absolutely. Is it well-written? Beyond doubt. But it is a heart-rending memoir of a woman who battles her own addiction as she waits out the death of her terminally ill and addicted partner? I didn’t think so. It was too glib.

Let’s back up now. Elizabeth Gilbert is a famous writer who also happens to be very, very good. Her memoir Eat, Pray, Love is what shot her to fame. But her fiction, ‘Signature of All Things’ and ‘Pilgrims’ are beautiful, poignant, and woven with sparkle and sadness of someone with deep expertise with emotions. She first had a meltdown and nervous breakdown of sorts, which is why she traveled to India, Indonesia, and Italy to find herself. She did. And she met her first husband. Then she wrestled with her own intellectual constructs of marriage and she wrote about it in ‘Committed’’. It is a well-researched and nicely articulated commentary on the institution. Later, in life, Gilbert divorces the husband, realizes she is a lesbian, and gets married to her hairdresser, Rayya Elias. (As an aside, Rayya’s memoir ‘Harley Loco’ is a wonderful, brittle book. Excellent!)

Now, Rayya was a recovering addict. When she contracts a terminal illness and is given 3 months to live, she starts ‘using’ again. Meanwhile Liz Gilbert realizes that she is in love with Rayya and must spend these months with her. They live it up, move homes, change lives, party hard, write songs, etc. – except that Rayya does not die. Liz, who has scripted a story of deep, tragic love story and has appointed herself as a dutiful partner is rudely jolted. She is burning through her savings, her partner has started lying to her and has started behaving like an addict, and this story doesn’t seem like it is going to end anytime soon. The story goes downhill from her – the darkest point of shame comes when Liz plots to murder her partner…and her partner sees through this. (The build up to this event and the face-off itself is perhaps the most dazzling, brilliant piece of writing in this book…and in a lot of books, I reckon. And as strange and mind-bending as it is, it is relatable. We may not have all plotted to kill the people we love. But we have thought disgusting thoughts about them and encountered a strong demon in the mirror.)

After hitting this low, Liz Gilbert decides to move out of the house leaving the partner to die by herself.

After some reflection later, Liz understands that she herself is a sex and love addict. Her love for Rayya was her need to be so desperately relied upon by someone that they would not leave. She herself was so scared of being alone that she manipulated so many situations where she would use people for security, filling a void, provide unending validation, etc. It was a kaleidoscope of compelling and crippling feelings – and none of that shade was love.

The book then explores different aspects of her own treatment, her mental breakdown, her talks with God, her conversations with ‘Love’, etc. – things that allowed her to see the sewage in her own heart.

She is a remarkably good writer. She has used poems and some doodles to intersperse this work – and they are nourishing – as nourishing as the sunlight streaming through the stained glass windows of her church-converted home. And parts of her hop-drop-shop for the next bleeding heart is frustrating and exhausting. You feel tired on her behalf. So you are with her, on her journey, in her shoes, with her map and compass that have stopped working. That’s some quality literature.

Still – something’s missing. It did feel like a beautiful smile that didn’t reach the eyes. Now, I don’t know if it was her or me. I mean, I had read her decades ago when I was younger. Finding yourself was a big deal for me. Now, I think I have found myself and even encountered that voracious demon that wants to usurp every bit of attention it can find. So maybe I too am jaded. This is why neat, descriptive explanations seem like elegantly strung words and not lived truths. Maybe some part of my own heart is so calloused that it cannot accept tenderness.

But what did stay with me was the story of the book’s title. Rayya believed that friends could be categorized according to which people would accompany you to different areas of New York. Some superficial people were your Fifth Avenue friends. Some others were your Bronx pals. But the really tiny group – the ones who may have paid your bail money or helped you hide a dead body or things like that – they are the ones who will accompany you right to the banks of the East River. They’re the ones you’ll take ‘All the Way to the River’.

I read this book in my trip to Haridwar and Rishikesh. I thought of this para when I saw someone immerse a pot of ashes in the Ganga. “All the Way to the River” took on a different meaning right then.

Liz Gilbert will always be a special writer for me. With Signature of All Things and Eat, Pray, Love, she was special because of how she wrote the stories. Today she’s special because of how I read her.