I.

Fifty-six-year-old Elizabeth Gilbert is one of the bestselling authors of this millennium. Her nine books—memoirs, fiction, and a 2015 self-help guide titled Big Magic for people who think of themselves as “creative”—have sold about 25 million copies between them. The top Elizabeth Gilbert seller of all is her 2006 offering Eat Pray Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything, which accounts for nearly half of her total book sales. Still in print after nearly two decades, it tells the story of Gilbert’s year-long, globe-circling quest to “find herself” after a bad divorce and an even worse post-divorce love affair. It spent nearly four years on the New York Times bestseller list and generated a hit 2010 film starring Julia Roberts as Gilbert and Javier Bardem as “Felipe,” the Brazilian import-export entrepreneur in Bali who became her new romantic interest in 2005 and her second husband in 2007. Uniformly terrible reviews notwithstnding, the movie grossed more than US$200 million on a budget of US$60 million.

Gilbert’s latest memoir, All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation, appeared in early September of this year, and it tells the story of what happened after Eat Pray Love: a death-doomed lesbian affair with her longtime hairdresser and best friend, Rayya Elias—a Syrian-Christian immigrant nearly a decade older than Gilbert with a turbulent past that included addictions to cocaine and heroin and stints in jail. She had been clean and cutting Gilbert’s hair in lower Manhattan since 2000, when Gilbert was married to her first husband. In 2008, Elias was going through a divorce of her own from a lesbian marriage and was now out of work. So Gilbert moved her into a repurposed church in upstate New York that she had bought on a whim with some of her Eat Pray Love money. In lieu of rent, Gilbert instructed Elias to write her autobiography, and in 2013, the book was duly published (with an introduction by Gilbert) as Harley Loco: A Memoir of Hard Living, Hair, and Post-Punk From the Middle East to the Lower East Side. (Elias was a motorcycle fanatic and sometime rock guitarist and singer.)

Thereafter, Elias became Gilbert’s constant travel companion, doing her hair and makeup on book and lecture tours, but their friendship didn’t turn carnal until April 2016, when Elias was diagnosed with pancreatic and liver cancer and given six months to live. Upon learning this news, Gilbert initiated divorce proceedings against Bardem’s real-life counterpart (named José Nunes) and moved from the arty southern New Jersey town (where the couple had settled) into an East Village penthouse that she had rented as a love nest for herself and Elias. There, Elias fortified herself with cigarettes, alcohol, Xanax, Ambien, psilocybin, weed, and MDMA (the last six of which she shared with Gilbert on a regular basis). Later, when the pain kicked in and she relapsed into addiction, she added mind-boggling quantities of prescription opioids and street cocaine. She lasted a good year and a half longer than her predicted “expiration date,” as she called it. It was living “balls to the walls,” as she put it in her characteristic butch-dyke diction, and she didn’t die until early 2018.

I must admit that initially I had no intention of either buying or reading All the Way to the River, ever. I’m not a memoir aficionado to begin with (unless the writer is Joan Didion or St. Augustine) because I find the fixation on one’s self and its sufferings tedious. And I had avoided both the book and the movie adaptation of Eat Pray Love like I’d avoid a theme restaurant. I’m dead-certain, though, that of the 12 million copies of the book sold over the years, 11,999,999 of the purchasers were female. How many men want to read about a woman—and I’m quoting from the jacket blurbs here—who leaves her “husband, country house, successful career ... all these outward marks of success ... to explore three different aspects of her nature, against the backdrop of three different cultures: pleasure in Italy, devotion in India, and on the Indonesian island of Bali, a balance between worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence”?

Eat Pray Love seemed like a fantasy voyage for the legions of educated, affluent, middle-aged Western women (Gilbert was 34 when she undertook her journey) who gorge on carbohydrates (piles of pasta in Rome for Gilbert) after their boyfriends dump them or they divorce their dullard husbands to find hipper and better-looking mates, even though they themselves are past their peak. A few months of trendy Eastern religion—meditating in an Indian ashram, consulting Balinese folk-healers—makes them feel appropriately spiritual (but not so excessively spiritual that it might interfere with their thrilling new romantic lives). The decade or so preceding the publication of Eat Pray Love was a yoga-mat banner time for a conflation of genuine Eastern practice, New Age hoo-hah, and staying in shape via stretching and head-standing. Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart (1996) and T.K.V. Desikachar’s The Heart of Yoga (1999) were bestsellers among the self-care set. Eat Pray Love begat its own mindfulness-centric consumer culture: jewellery, perfume, teas, group tours of Southeast Asia’s mystical destinations. The palm-reading business of Ketut Lyer—a Balinese holy man who figures prominently in the book and was played by Hadi Subiyanto in the movie—reportedly boomed after the book’s publication.

Conveniently for Gilbert and her publishers, the time frame also coincided with a craze for all things Italian among Eat Pray Love’s target demographic. The year 1997 saw the publication of Under the Tuscan Sun, which was a kind of prelude to Eat Pray Love. Its author, Frances Mayes, was also recovering from a painful divorce at nearly the same age (35) as Gilbert, and so she wrote about her painstaking renovation of a rundown villa in Cortona. Mayes’s book spent two and a half years on the New York Times bestseller list, generated several follow-up volumes, including a Tuscan-themed cookbook and a home-decor guide, and like Eat Pray Love, it spawned a movie, in 2003, starring Diane Lane as Mayes and David Sutcliffe as her handsome new love-object. Meanwhile, hordes of upper-middle-class and aspiring upper-middle-class American women sponge-painted their homes’ interior walls to give them a plastered Italianate look and adorned their kitchens with copies of Marcella Hazan’s Marcella Cucina (1997), with its pappardelle and balsamic vinegar.

As for the Eat Pray Love film, I saw the trailer in a movie house when it came out during the autumn of 2010 and I decided that it looked feeble: clips of Roberts in floppy hats staring down plates of spaghetti, bicycling through rice paddies, towering over toothless natives as they imparted exotic Eastern wisdom, and of course, canoodling with Bardem. I couldn’t help but agree with David Jenkins’s take on the movie in 2014:

Writing a negative review of Eat Pray Love isn’t like shooting fish in a barrel. It’s like hauling out a fish, placing the barrel of a revolver against its slimy gills, then pulling the trigger while intoning a grave, possibly aquatic-themed, soliloquy.

Jenkins maintained that Ryan Murphy’s adaptation was actually “a piece of satire, a pin-sharp mockery of the source book and all its can-do, ‘you-go-girl’, chakra-aligning aphorisms.” And I must admit that, even in 2010—the beginning of the Peak Woke Decade—it looked condescending, if not outright ridiculous, to watch a financially strapped Balinese medicine woman weep tears of humble gratitude when Roberts-as-Gilbert hands her a check for US$18,000 so she can buy a house for herself and her daughter.

There were complaints from Italians that Murphy had reduced their country to a caricature of primitive bath fixtures and cacophonous cafes where ordering a cappuccino meant making obscene hand-gestures and yelling obscene japery at the barista. And as wedding pictures of Gilbert and her pudgy, bald-headed husband show, the couple bore no physical resemblance to Roberts and Bardem whatsoever. I noted with some amusement that, a decade after the book’s publication, Gilbert ditched Nunes as precipitously as she had ditched her first husband, in order to take up with Elias—and that after Elias’s death, she returned to heterosexual life once more in a short-lived (as it turned out) relationship with British photographer Simon MacArthur, one of Elias’s friends.

All of which is to say that when Gilbert’s new memoir arrived, my interest in reading it was nil.

II.

But then I read an extract from from All the Way to the River in the Guardian in August, and I discovered something: Elizabeth Gilbert is actually a terrific writer. Unlike the cappuccino-frothy haze of woo surrounding the Eat Pray Love phenomenon, Gilbert’s actual writing is vivid, rhythmic, tough-minded, and most important, imbued with mordant honesty and a crackling, self-aware sense of humour. What Gilbert chronicled in that excerpt was horrific: Elias’s determination to deal with her mortality by going out in a cataclysm of booze and blow (plus, at the end, opioids) meant that Gilbert became a slave—an all-too-self-destructively willing slave but a slave nonetheless—to Elias’s self-perceived needs and desires. Besotted as she was with newly discovered love, she would do anything for her lover, she wrote—and she did.

Here is a sample:

I began to really pour myself into Rayya—showering her not only with love and care but also with money and resources. I completely took over her life from a financial standpoint, not only paying for her medical expenses and her rent and her bucket-list experiences but also buying her things. So many things! Anything Rayya had ever wanted I insisted she must now have. Had she specifically asked me for these things? I cannot now remember. But I desired her. So I gave it all to her, and fuck the expense: I didn’t care if it bankrupted me.

Do you want a Range Rover? Here is your Range Rover.
Do you want a brand-new piano? Here is your brand-new piano.
Do you want a Rolex and Prada boots? Here are your Rolex and your Prada boots.
Here you go, my love—it is yours, it is yours, it is all yours!

And here is another:

[T]o be honest, the police might very well have come for her (for both of us, actually), because our apartment now contained thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of cocaine—some of which Rayya was cooking down and shooting into whatever veins she could find upon her beaten-down, disease-ridden body, some of which she was freebasing, some of which she was snorting up her now constantly bloodied nose. But most of the coke, as of this moment, she had chopped up and laid out in thick rails on the coffee table, next to an overflowing ashtray, a bottle of whiskey, several bottles of morphine and trazodone and Xanax, a stack of fentanyl patches and a cluster of empty beer bottles. And these heaping lines of cocaine she counted, weighed and studied all day long.

“What the fuck are you looking at?” she demanded, glancing up for a moment from her cherished cocaine heaps and peering at me through a blue haze of cigarette smoke—staring me down with hostile eyes that had not, as far as I could remember, blinked in days.

So exhausted and deranged by this did Gilbert become, she relates, that she devised an elaborate plan to murder Elias by swapping her morphine pills for sleeping pills and then covering her body with enough fentanyl patches to overdose her into permanent oblivion. “Rayya did not want to die. But I wanted her to die.” Gilbert tells us that she was dissuaded from this homicidal scheme only when Elias evidenced a sixth sense that something was up, which sent Gilbert fleeing from the apartment:

Then I heard a voice in my head—a voice that pierced my confusion so cleanly and swiftly that it could only have come from God. The voice said this: If you have arrived at a point in your life where you are seriously considering murdering yourself or another human being, there is a strong possibility that you have reached the end of your power.

Was all of this completely true? Some of Elias’s surviving relatives have denied that Gilbert bestowed such extravagant gifts on her, and the coffee table piled high with lines of illegally gotten coke also seems like an exaggeration. I also found Gilbert’s framing of the situation in the therapeutic jargon of the twelve-step program—not just Elias’s addiction but Gilbert’s own (“I’m a sex and love addict”)—off-putting. The phrase “sex addict” has always struck me as psychobabble for “can’t keep my legs crossed,” which didn’t even seem true of Gilbert, whose self-described dating life before, during, and after her marriages struck me as occasionally impulsive but never particularly promiscuous.

Nevertheless, the Guardian extract was so harrowing and powerful that I decided that I wanted to read more Elizabeth Gilbert. She had been an astonishingly successful magazine journalist during the 1990s, when she was only in her twenties. She had started her writing career with a Pushcart Prize-winning short story, “Pilgrims,” published in Esquire in November 1993, but her best-known essay from that period was “The Muse of the Coyote Ugly Saloon,” published in the March 1997 issue of GQ, in which she recounted tales from a year spent slinging drinks and dancing on the counter as part of the all-female bar staff at the boisterous Western-themed dive in the East Village: “We were a cross between Old West dancehall hookers and gangsters’ gun molls. Crack that gum, swing that ass, drink that shot, keep that change.”

Gilbert was one of the first hires, and she started working there a week after the bar opened in January 1993 shortly after she finished college. So riveting were Gilbert’s yarns—flying glass shards in the wee hours, barmaids pouring Jack Daniels straight down patrons’ throats from the bottle, colourful regulars with Damon Runyan-esque nicknames like Redneck Lou and Little Vinnie—that they inspired a hit Jerry Bruckheimer movie titled Coyote Ugly in 2000, and turned the bar into a worldwide franchise and tourist destination. (The original East Village location closed in 2020 and reopened in a glitzier version in the same neighbourhood in 2023.) The movie’s rom-com plot, involving a greenhorn barmaid from deepest Jersey (Piper Perabo) yearning for love and a songwriting career in the big city, had nothing to do with Gilbert’s article, although Gilbert was paid handsomely to sign off her rights.

There was always a question mark over the veracity of Gilbert’s anecdotes, which seemed to lose nothing in the telling, and to which she was often neither witness nor participant. For example, it’s illegal in the state of New York—as in all other states, for obvious reasons—for bartenders to pour alcohol down the throats of their customers. It’s also illegal for barkeeps in New York and most other states to consume on the job, which Gilbert says was common practice, and even encouraged, at the Coyote in order to keep the men buying (she wrote that she just pretended, spitting out the liquor into a mug of Coca-Cola that she passed off as a chaser). Did the girls actually run streams of firewater down the top of the bar and then light the stuff as they do in the movie? Seems like a good way to burn down the house. And when the customers wouldn’t leave at the 4 am closing time, did Gilbert really step onto the bar with a broom and sweep away the remaining drinks? “The bottles roll to the floor and break; the beer spills everywhere.”

Seasons in the Sun

Sex, money, murder, and the decline of Mike White’s wildly popular HBO series ‘The White Lotus.’

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Gilbert also omits all biographical information about “Lil,” the Coyote Ugly’s owner, who comes across in the article as a Wild West force of nature whose main talents consist of wisecracking and drinking men under the table. In fact, the real-life Liliana Lovell, now 58, was a New York University graduate (like Gilbert herself) who shrewdly copied the Coyote’s country-music theming and trash-talking all-female staff from the now-defunct Village Idiot, another grimy East Village dive bar right across the street. Both localities were among a number of “cowboy bars” with nearly identical features that became a New York City fad during the 1990s. There was also a Mr. Lil on the scene who is never mentioned by Gilbert: Lovell’s (now apparently ex-)husband, Tony Piccirillo, who was also her business partner.

But nobody cared about the obvious embellishments and hyperbole. The article is a model of silver-age long-form. And if the New Journalism techniques Gilbert employed (bantering sessions with customers written down with apparent total recall four years later) resulted in something too good to be true, that might have been the point.

III.

Next, nineteen years after everyone else, I finally read Eat Pray Love. Then I watched the Julia Roberts movie. Alas, each in its own way turned out to be a slog. The film is bereft of amusement, even though Gilbert’s punchy style, sharp eye for observation, and self-deprecating humour are all over the book. She candidly admits, for example, that she never visited a single museum during her entire gluttonous four-month stay in Rome. (The film tries to make up for this with establishing shots of the Colosseum, St. Peter’s, and other well-known sights to remind viewers that this is indeed the Eternal City.) Her account of the US$18,000 gift to Wayan, the impoverished Balinese healing lady, is much more interesting—and telling—than the version of this encounter that appears in the movie. Wayan’s reaction to getting the money, raised by Gilbert from her relatives and friends, is to try to wheedle another US$20,000 out of her so she can buy a bigger plot of land and open a hotel. Gilbert, on the advice of Felipe, puts her foot down at that request. And the story has almost no dramatic tension (the film tries to manufacture some by confecting suspense about whether or not Gilbert will commit to a lasting relationship with Felipe? Answer: Yes).

But the biggest problem with the book—at least for me, although not, obviously, for 12 million other women—is that there’s just too much Elizabeth Gilbert in it. “The Muse of the Coyote Ugly Saloon” was all about Gilbert, too—particularly how she excelled at making the customers fall in love with her (“I wasn’t the prettiest bartender at the Coyote Ugly Saloon, but I was damn sure the best talker”). But there is a difference between a 5,000-word magazine article and a 368-page book. It’s Gilbert, Gilbert, Gilbert. Her thoughts and feelings, her moods and her needs and her desperations, her tears, her depression (oh, the depression!) and the antidepressants, the anti-anxiety medications and the sleeping pills that followed. Her discontent with her first marriage (she seems genuinely horrified by the idea that she might want to have a baby), and her even greater discontent with the divorce settlement that resulted (which included losing the big suburban house that symbolised the big suburban lifestyle she had fled—that house figures over and over in Gilbert’s autobiographical statements about herself).

Then, she has a rapturous post-divorce love affair with a New York actor named “David” (the names of most of the people in the book are pseudonyms). But David, wouldn’t you know, starts to feel the “need for more personal space,” and oh, the woe, the pain, the weeping, the catastrophe! It lasts, off and on in earfuls, until page 208, when “Richard from Texas” (played by Richard Jenkins in the movie), a fellow seeker at the ashram, tells her, “Move ahead with your life, will ya?” I know. I was there myself in my younger days, boring my friends to tears with moans over it’s-not-you-it’s-me incidents that hit me hard. But that doesn’t mean I want to read a whole book’s worth of someone else’s complaints.

Gilbert even manages to turn even the modest amount of actual sightseeing she does between whole pizzas and third helpings of Felipe’s feijoada into opportunities for self-preoccupation. Here she is at the Mausoleum Augusteum in Rome, the much-ravaged tomb that the Emperor Augustus built for himself in 28 B.C.: “The Augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may have once intended to serve.” OK, Elizabeth. Other people she meets on her travels—assorted expats, fellow students in her Italian classes in Rome, locals in India and Bali—tend to be two-dimensional cutouts with ethnic monickers: Luca Spaghetti (yes, his real name), Giovanni, Maria, Tulsi, Yudhi, Nyomo. Indeed, Richard from Texas is the first fully realised character we meet in the book—and he doesn’t arrive until page 152. He’s a twangy, talky cousin of Redneck Lou; Gilbert does well as a writer with regional extroverts with larger-than-life personalities.

The more skeptical—and the more envy-prone—of Eat Pray Love's readers have wondered about the authenticity of this. The revelation that she had been paid a US$200,000 publisher’s advance to take her voyage of self-exploration and write it up seemed to disturb some readers—even though she candidly admits to being the object of this “staggering personal miracle” on page 38. “Is it a real memoir,” the author of the blog Leaves & Pages asked in 2017, “if someone’s paying your way to collect material before you even set out?” As a writer myself, I can’t see anything wrong with this common publishing practice (I got an advance on the only book I’ve written), and the entity that is now the Viking Random House empire certainly got a bonanza return on its investment in Gilbert.

But there is indeed something a tad synthetic about Eat Pray Love’s creation. I couldn’t help chuckling at Gilbert's revelation that some four months into this year of self-discovery, she flew back home to America to take a Christmas break. She tells her readers absolutely nothing about the nuts and bolts of recording her experiences and putting the book together. How did she preserve those long conversations at the ashram with Richard from Texas that she purports to transcribe verbatim? Did she record them on a device? Did she rush back to her room to jot down the words in a journal?

There is also something manufactured about her itinerary itself. She had already been to Bali and interviewed Ketut the palm-reader for a magazine article, so her second encounter with him was hardly a new experience. As for the Indian ashram, that was also familiar territory in a sense—she was already chanting and meditating weekly right in New York City, because the female guru who operated the ashram (Gilbert never divulges her name, although there have been plenty of media guesses) also happened to be David’s guru, and Gilbert had been attending sessions with her for months, if not years. I had to ask: If all that meditation in New York wasn't helping to cure her depression, why did she think that meditation in India would do it?

IV.

In All the Way to the River, all these problems are writ large. For a start, for all the flamboyant grieving over Elias (“Rayya who broke my heart. Rayya who loved me the most.”), Gilbert never manages to make her dead lover sound like an especially appealing figure. Elias clomps through the book—and Gilbert’s life—in her motorcycle boots, says “fuck” in practically every sentence, and for someone as street-savvy and as skilled as a hairdresser as Gilbert says she is, never manages to hold a job for long, even when sober. This means she’s financially dependent on Gilbert most of the time, which is a nice way of saying that she was essentially a leech.

Sure, sometimes Elias’s foul mouth and bull-in-a-china-shop bluntness seem just the right acid bath for the suffocating left-cultural censoriousness of the 21st century’s opening decades. As part of a program titled “Voices From the Edge” in 2013, she and Gilbert give a joint reading in the East Village shortly after Gilbert’s second novel, The Signature of All Things, is published. Afterwards, a woman from the audience waylays and castigates them both for failing to provide a “trigger warning” about “sensitive material” in Elias’s book that could have provoked a “traumatic reaction” in some listeners. Elias’s response: “Listen, bitch. If you didn’t want to be triggered tonight, maybe you shouldn’t have come to an event at a Lower East Side bar called “Voices From the Edge.” ... [H]ere’s the thing about that ‘sensitive material’ you're talking about. That’s my fucking life. This is my story, my book, and it tells the story about my body—and you’re not gonna make me feel ashamed of myself for sharing the truth about my own life. In fact, if you can’t enjoy the night like everyone else, just get out of here.”

Bravo! But a little of this goes a long way, and when Elias skids into her relapse, the profanity turns nasty and nastily directed at her caregivers; she was “kicked out of hospice (who gets kicked out of hospice, by the way?),” Gilbert writes. Gilbert herself seemed to be Elias’s special target of abuse, even as she was emptying her bank accounts to feed the narcotic “dragon” that “lifted its leathery, powerful wings and flew on silent gusts through Rayya’s bloodstream.” Gilbert was now, according to Elias, a “needy little fucking crybaby” and a “fucking shitshow of a failure” who needed to “grow the fuck up”—and who also couldn’t even toast bread to the correct shade of brown the way Elias had told her she wanted it “ten fucking times.” Because Elias was “fucking dying.”

Even back in the early stages of their friendship, when Elias was counting up the days and months and years she had been clean and sober, she was fudging around the edges. She kept stashes of tiny bottles of Angostura bitters in her purse and her luggage, but she insisted that they didn’t count as booze because they were digestive aids, even though bitters are the same alcoholic proof as vodka. A few years later, it became wine, at first a little, then a lot, which also didn’t count, according to Elias, even though she had contracted hepatitis-C during her heroin days and wasn’t supposed to be drinking at all. We have to take it on faith that Elias was the wonderful person that Gilbert thinks she was: “a churning, energetic current of pure Rayyaness.” (In all fairness, others were charmed by Elias, too; an undated twelve-minute documentary about her by the videographer John Christian Cathcart can be found on Facebook.)

Contrary to her book’s title, Gilbert didn’t quite go all the way to the River Styx with Elias. Shortly after the murder near-attempt, they had a fight, and Elias told her, “I wish we’d never gotten together. ... You’re way too much fucking trouble to deal with—just the way I always knew you would be. I wish we’d just stayed friends. That way, I would still have access to all the good parts of you, but someone else could deal with all your emotional bullshit.” Wounded to the core, Gilbert evicted her from the apartment, which was about to be sold anyway, and abandoned her to her own wolves. Amazingly—or perhaps not so amazingly—Elias proved to be quite capable of taking care of herself on her own. She moved right back to her home town, Detroit, and in with an old girlfriend named Stacey. Stacey knew exactly what to do. She cut Elias off from the hooch and the drugs, except for enough painkillers to actually kill the pain without making her high, and found her a competent doctor and nurses. A few months later, Gilbert showed up in Detroit, although now she had to compete for Elias’s attention with Stacey, with Elias’s ex-wife Gigi, with the doctors and nurses who Gilbert insisted weren’t feeding Elias enough morphine, and with Elias’s Syrian-American family members, who had their own ideas about how and with whom Rayya should spend her last days and what her funeral services should be like.

There is horror and genuine sadness in this story, along with flashes of Gilbert’s characteristic wit. When Elias is unconscious and appears to be about to breathe her last on Christmas night in 2017, her trio of female former lovers—Stacey, Gigi, and Gilbert herself—light candles around her bed, turn on a Gregorian chant, and pile into her bed to wrap their bodies around her own. Elias immediately opens her eyes, wonders what’s “fucking” going on with the candles and the music, and demands to be driven to the Lululemon after-Christmas sale. She spends an hour there trying on athleisure, and dies nine days later, on 4 January 2018.

As usual with Gilbert, I did have to have to wonder about the truth of much of this narrative. Did she really register herself as an addict with a New York City “harm-reduction” program, as she writes, so that she could get clean needles for Elias’s coke injections? And how did Gilbert really got along with the crowd in Detroit, who were probably not as impressed as she herself was with her Eat Pray Love fame and fortune? And what did Nunes, who must now be in his 70s, think about the whole Rayya Elias debacle, which blew up his marriage to Gilbert, among other things? Whether out of charity, solipsism, or lawsuit-savviness, Gilbert is deliberately vague about the unpleasant interactions with other people that her infatuation with Elias must have entailed. 

This grim and pitiable narrative, encapsulated in the Guardian excerpt, of two middle-aged women entangled in a two-year nightmare of mutual manipulation and emotional destruction might have made a fine long-form magazine article. But Gilbert has insisted on padding it out into an Eat Pray Love-length book. Elias dies on page 295, but the memoir lurches on for another ninety pages, all of which are mostly about, yes, Gilbert herself. There’s also an additional fifty pages or so of introductory material before she even starts the story of Rayya Elias. And then there are entire pages devoted to poems and doodle-like drawings by Gilbert. Gilbert isn’t a bad artist—she can certainly draw better than I can—but she should really leave the poetry to others. (Sample: “God, I am weary of being myself / And it appears that you will not allow me to be you / No matter how hard I try.”)

There are also beyond-the-grave apparitions—some of which come via a medium Gilbert consults and others of which arrive on their own—of Elias (“I’m right here and I love you!”), Gilbert’s inner child, and even, bizarrely, Elias’s mother. A fascinating thing about All the Way to the River is how nearly completely she seems to have forgotten all the meditation practices and Eastern lore that she said saved her life in Eat Pray Love. “I am happy and healthy and balanced,” she wrote at the end of that book, inspiring legions of other women to embark on spirituality regimens and trips to Indonesia of their own. But in the nine intervening years, Gilbert has converted to a new and different religion: the jargon of Alcoholics Anonymous. Not only is she a “sex and love addict” these days, but also an “enabler” and a “codependent.” Enabler, yes—plying a mortally ill junkie with street drugs. But who isn’t “addicted” to being loved? And isn’t there something logically impossible about being an “addict” and a “codependent” at the same time? Gilbert twists herself into contortions as she tries to cram even her second-grade school crushes into the lugubrious patois of the twelve steps: “Like many addicts, I always suspected there was something wrong with me.”

All the Way to the River was an Oprah’s Book Club selection, and it immediately shot to the No. 2 slot for hardcover nonfiction on the New York Times bestseller list. It has since fallen off, however. Perhaps it’s the competition with Virginia Giuffre. Perhaps it’s the off-putting jacket photo of Gilbert herself, who has recently shaved her head and, clad in an enormous turtleneck, looks as though she’s peering out of a manhole. (I’m not being catty; she admits on page 361 that almost everyone hates her new non-coiffure, and Rayya the hairdresser would surely have hated it, too.) It’s one thing to read about saving your soul in far-flung locations amid lush tropical greenery and sandy beaches and being swept off your feet by a handsome Brazilian prince (or a Brazilian of some sort, at least). It’s quite another to read about saving your soul in dreary church-basement meetings and cradling your mug of black coffee. That might really be too much Elizabeth Gilbert.