All the Way to the River

Biographies and memoirs require balance – between honesty and respect, vulnerability and compassion, between the story of who a person is, and how they live. Elizabeth Gilbert’s fourth memoir balances love, hurt, grief and hope, in memory of – and reckoning with – her late partner, lover and friend Rayya Elias. In an overflowing fount of earnestness, empathy and optimism, Gilbert brings love and eye-watering honesty to this account of their relationship, framed, as it was in life, by their addictions, and Elias’s terminal diagnosis. Part biography, part memoir, Gilbert explores the highs, lows and heartbreaks of their lives together and beyond, and the perpetual process of finding and maintaining sobriety.

The title refers to Elias’s framework for friendship – a geographic concept of closeness, walking from superficial ‘Fifth Avenue’ acquaintanceships, through the lifelong loves of Alphabet City, and, finally, to the rawest intimacy: the one person who takes you all the way to the river. But, like the real East River, the journey of death and relapse can be hard to look at. Gilbert’s story is no tasteful picture of sun glinting off clear water – it’s a highly saturated close-up in sharp and unforgiving focus.

Whether or not you agree with Gilbert on faith, philosophy, love or addiction, this window into her internal processes and perspectives, her methods of healing and her great big hope, is a mesmerising peek into the classroom of her ‘Earth School’ – where she has learned her lessons. At no point does Gilbert command you to agree: but instead, she offers the opportunity to bear witness to her and Elias’s lives, love, loss and recovery. Taking the reader into her notebooks, her camera roll and her innermost thoughts, Gilbert does what she has always done – shake off the shackles of shame and stand, raw and unafraid, in her truth.