Elizabeth Gilbert’s self-help addiction

We’ve been here before with Gilbert. On the floor, that is. Her genre-defining memoir, Eat Pray Love, opens with Gilbert wishing that a man would kiss her. After her young Italian teacher leaves her in her apartment in Rome, she realises she is all alone: “Grasping this reality, I let go of my bag, drop to my knees, and press my forehead against the floor.” While she’s down there she remembers the moment that led her to this situation: lying on her old bathroom floor in New York, wishing she was no longer married and sobbing so hard that “a great lake of tears and snot was spreading before me”.

Collapsing to the floor is a not particularly subtle metaphor for the kind of rock-bottom personal crises of which Gilbert is such a vivid chronicler. Part of the charm of her writing is how she allows us to see ourselves in her darkest moments. “How the hell did I get here? is a question that I believe everybody will have to face at some point during their passage through life,” she writes in her new memoir, which comes nearly 20 years after Eat Pray Love and yet sees her circling many of the same issues as though she’s stuck in a holding pattern. Everyone will indeed face that question in their lifetime, but few of us will walk all the way to the river in the way Gilbert does in this book – the title a reference to the sort of person you would travel to the ends of the earth for – and ever want to repeat the experience again.

The romance between Gilbert and Rayya begins after the latter’s cancer diagnosis, when she is given six months to live. Rayya is a recovering heroin addict who had already lived a million lives before, working as a hairdresser, she cut Gilbert’s hair in her East Village apartment. Gilbert estimates that it was not until eight or nine years later that she fell in love with Rayya, though both remained in denial for years. The news of Rayya’s diagnosis, however, awakens something in Gilbert, who leaves her second husband – the Brazilian man she found love with at the end of her first memoir – and confesses her feelings for her best friend.

High on their love finally being out in the open, and squeezing every last drop from a life that is running out, the pair live with joyful abandon for months, enjoying endless karaoke nights and once-in-a-lifetime holidays. But Rayya’s addiction catches up with her when she is prescribed opioids to deal with the pain that comes after ending her chemotherapy treatment. This kickstarts a death spiral of drug abuse and emotional terrorism, which ultimately comes to an end after Gilbert, in her own words, “the nice lady who wrote Eat Pray Love”, comes “very close to premeditatedly and cold-bloodedly murdering” her partner.

Rayya eventually dies 18 months after her diagnosis and leaves Gilbert to confront her own love and sex addiction, entering a 12-step programme, getting a sponsor and giving up her “desperate and exhausting lifelong pursuit of romantic enmeshment”. After a lifetime of running from one relationship to another, she is forced to sit still and bow down.

The vast, sprawling influence of Gilbert’s 2006 phenomenon, Eat Pray Love, which sold 30 million copies, is difficult to overstate. In All the Way to the River, she laments how the book “shunted me straight into the chick-lit dungeon of many people’s imaginations”, and you can see her influence on the transformative female-journey memoirs that followed, especially Cheryl Strayed’s Wild. Both were made into films starring A-list actresses, and both have inspired pilgrimages to Italy, India and Indonesia, and along the Pacific Crest Trail in the US, for fans looking to find themselves – or at least gelato.

But Gilbert’s influence is still visible in the recent trend for nature cure books, where authors journey through mountains, rivers and fields during periods of painful self-reckoning. Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun, detailing how the author took to the wilderness of Orkney while battling her addiction, was the breakout success, but books extolling the soul-cleansing powers of everything from gardening to dry-stone walling have followed.

Instagram launched four years after Eat Pray Love. Though the style of self-narration prevalent on the platform – dubbed “main character syndrome” – has since become egotistical to a point beyond parody, it perhaps owes a debt to the open-hearted sincerity and spirit of self-discovery forged in Gilbert’s memoir. With All the Way to the River, she blurs the line between Instagram and reality ever further, writing in fragmented, poem-like prose slotted between actual poems, which echo the manicured style of the social media platform’s favourite poet, Rupi Kaur. Gilbert’s ironing of devastating experiences into pithy lines of text makes them read like Instagram captions or phrases ripe for intricate wrist tattoos, and sometimes this form feels like an attempt to hold the story rigidly in place, rather than allowing for a messier reality.

One poem titled How to Surrender reads simply: “For once in your life, let the butter cut the knife”, and the book is littered with similarly tricksy homilies (“I overlooked it, rather than looking it over”; “I was literally withdrawing with drawing”), so that it occasionally feels like collecting bumper stickers. Often, she jarringly blends a hyper-conversational tone with guru-speak. “That’s some real addicty shit right there,” she says of her secret-keeping, before continuing: “because secrecy is the greenhouse in which addiction blooms, flourishes, and metastasises.”

Gilbert’s sincere belief that addiction and pain are universal experiences is an act of outreach to her readers. “I feel you, I know you,” she seems to be saying. But it also flattens the individual experiences of the book, which combine to form a unique and truly extraordinary series of events. “Love addiction, drug addiction…” she writes. “It’s all the same thing.” But is it really?

We hear about the depths of Rayya’s addiction in grim detail, permission having been granted by Rayya after she handed over her journals. But Gilbert is still here, and so while there is certainly bravery and honesty in how she shares her own addiction journey, the vague references to early trauma and car-crash relationships mean we only see the rough shape of her story, not the full picture. Gilbert is perfectly entitled to keep this information to herself, but there is a resultant sense of being short-changed. A New York Times review of Eat Pray Love from 2006 similarly intuited Gilbert holding back, writing that “her crisis remains a shadowy thing”.

This is all the more disappointing because Gilbert is so talented at creating vivid images out of her pain, which soak into the page. She writes here of “pouring myself into” a man, the same acrobatic act of self-abandonment that in Eat Pray Love she described as diving “out of my marriage and into David’s arms exactly the same way a cartoon circus performer dives off a high platform and into a small cup of water, vanishing completely”.

Her new memoir is similarly full of lines that take root in your brain. Recalling the moment she thought Rayya was dying as she drifted in and out of consciousness, she writes that “it was like she was testing the waters of the other side and then returning to our mortal shores”. After her death, with Gilbert reeling from her sudden, startling disappearance, she writes that it is as though she had “stepped out of the universe for a packet of cigarettes and had never come back”.

I reread Eat Pray Love a few years ago when my own marriage was crumbling. It was seductive to believe that the cosmos had a bigger plan for me at a time when I couldn’t see beyond the end of an hour.

Going through bad things has a way of making you believe they were designed to teach you something. After all, who would rather believe in pointless suffering? This is the Gilbert school of hitting rock bottom, as she writes: “A more fruitful question than ‘Why me?’ could be ‘How might this terrible situation be perfectly designed to help me evolve?’”

Still, when I read the book on the tube, I self-consciously wrapped the hardback jacket of another over it to avoid signalling my personal crisis in public. Perhaps also because Gilbert’s style of wide-eyed optimism is out of fashion: just look at the recent glut of dark divorce books like Lyz Lenz’s This American Ex-Wife, Leslie Jamison’s Splinters, Sarah Manguso’s Liars. Gilbert’s supernatural ability to find the upside is her unique power as a writer, but reading All the Way to the River – with its radical hope amid crushing darkness – I often felt like I had gone through the looking glass. As the real world grows increasingly dystopian and we become more jaded, Gilbert has chosen a different path: following her truth and clinging to the belief that there has to be a happy ending, even if not the one you had imagined.

The darkest scenes of All the Way to the River come during the months when Rayya capsizes into an ocean of addiction and drags Gilbert into the shallows by inflicting emotional cruelty on her. But even before there is any hint of salvation arriving, Gilbert believes it’s coming. “There were moments, even amid all the dissonance of that awful summer, when I thought I could see something mysterious moving behind all this drama – something that was nearly out of frame, something that shimmered right at the furthest edges of my comprehension.”

By seeing whatever happens to her as a “divinely appointed challenge”, or part of a curriculum that we are assigned at birth in an institution she calls Earth School, it allows for the possibility that we might be liberated from some of the pain of our experiences. In a different book, holding such a conviction might make a character a sucker. But Gilbert – who finishes the book alone but content, optimistic but for perhaps the first time only cautiously so – is a good advert for what to do when you end up on the floor: take it as a sign from the universe to look inward. Maybe the rest of us are the suckers, after all.

All the Way to the River: Love, Loss and Liberation by Elizabeth Gilbert is published by Bloomsbury (£22). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £19.80. Delivery charges may apply

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Photography by Elizabeth Gilbert