Elizabeth Gilbert’s brutal honesty shows why she still matters
‘All the Way to the River’ is perhaps her boldest work
Author Elizabeth Gilbert in conversation with Bloomsbury Publishing editor-in-chief Alexandra Pringle at the Jaipur Literature Festival. File photo PTI
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Lately, I’ve been wondering whether we need marriage at all. Or romantic love. Or romantic partners. After all, at a time when people seem addicted to everything but love, honesty, and loyalty, the world will not rearrange itself to cushion our heartbreak.
For, addiction today wears many masks: substances, work, shopping, sex, the endless scroll of our screens. But what about addiction to people themselves? To the high of love, the crash of abandonment, the compulsive cycles of need and rejection? The way we pour ourselves into others to manage our emptiness, then blame them for leaving us hollow?
That’s why Elizabeth Gilbert’s latest book, ‘All the Way to the River’, held up a mirror to me — a brutally honest one — showing what relationships look like from an addict’s perspective. That perhaps the only truly healthy relationship is the one we build with ourselves. Showing why we must find a way to save ourselves, hence saving others from us. And in doing so, it reminded me why Gilbert still matters.
It’s the questions she dares ask: can a sex and love addict ever sustain a healthy relationship? What happens when a middle-aged woman no longer needs — or even wants — a partner? What does it mean to watch addicts relapse into old patterns, using people like drugs, creating further karmic cycles of pain?
This is not the Gilbert of ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ — a talisman for lonely women and a punchline for bored men. Nor is it the Gilbert of ‘Big Magic’, urging us to chase creativity with childlike wonder. In ‘All the Way to the River’, we meet a Gilbert stripped bare. No yoga mats, no candlelit certainty of reinvention. Just a woman walking with grief, wrestling with love, sitting with her shadow until it no longer scares her.
The memoir traces Gilbert’s relationship with musician Rayya Elias. Their love was unconventional, intoxicating, destructive. Addiction haunted both: Elias’ to substances, Gilbert’s to love. When Elias was diagnosed with terminal cancer, Gilbert vowed to walk her “all the way to the river” — to the end.
But this was no saintly vigil. It was tangled with rage, guilt, co-dependence, and the unbearable hunger of loving someone you cannot save. Gilbert even admits to thoughts that would horrify the moral guardians: would you lie, manipulate, even consider ending suffering by unnatural means? She doesn’t flinch. She asks these questions in public, knowing they invite judgment.
We accept grief when it’s curated: the tasteful eulogy, the soft-focus Instagram post. Gilbert refuses to curate. Her grief is jagged, her love unholy, her memoir messy. She writes of jealousy, of wanting to possess even as she lets go. That rawness is liberating. Because if Gilbert, with her millions of readers and literary empire, can be broken and unholy, then maybe we are allowed to be, too.
Confession is often dismissed as indulgence. But in a world that punishes women for speaking truth, confession is courage. Gilbert admits: I was weak, selfish, consumed. And yet I lived.
In India, where broken relationships can still erase a woman’s identity, where grief is policed by patriarchy, Gilbert’s memoir resonates. She shows us that loyalty to love does not mean self-erasure. That grief need not be ornamental. That even in loss, there can be liberation.
Gilbert’s career is often reduced to ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ — the ultimate chick-lit for the spiritual tourist. But trace her arc and you see a restless writer: the wanderlust of ‘Eat, Pray, Love’, the cynicism of ‘Committed’, the creative manifesto of ‘Big Magic’, the glittery romp of ‘City of Girls’.
With ‘All the Way to the River’, she makes her boldest pivot yet. Not escape, not reinvention — but staying put. In pain. In love. In loss. This is not self-help. Not a postcard from Bali. This is the excavation of the self when there’s nowhere left to run.
We live in an age of toxic positivity — gurus selling resilience, hashtags promising transformation, coaches monetising healing. Against that backdrop, Gilbert’s unvarnished honesty is radical. She doesn’t hand out mantras. She doesn’t sell a cure.
She sits in the mud with us and says: this, too, is life. The shame. The addiction. The anger. The helpless love. The devastating loss. And if you can live through it without annihilating yourself, perhaps that is liberation enough.
That’s why Elizabeth Gilbert matters. Not because she gives answers, but because she asks the questions we’re too afraid to face. Not because she is perfect, but because she is profoundly, publicly imperfect.
We see not a saint but a fellow struggler. Her words allow us to recognise our own hungers, humiliations, flawed loves, ungraceful griefs. And in recognising them, we learn we are not alone.
— The writer is an acclaimed author
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