Elizabeth Gilbert has been an iconic memoirist in the U.S. since Eat Pray Love landed on bookshelves nearly 20 years ago. Now, in her first memoir in a decade, Gilbert takes readers to a darker, more complicated space. This is a harrowing, vital, and ultimately transcendent exploration of fierce love, codependency, and grief.
All the Way to the River is the story of Gilbert's profound and life-altering relationship with Rayya Elias. Their bond found new contours when Elias was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic and liver cancer. On the verge of permanent loss, they revealed to each other the depth and nature of their love. But this joy was entwined with the fact that both women were addicts, albeit of different kinds. Elias had been in recovery for a time, but as her pain increased and her time grew shorter, she relapsed in intense fashion, with Gilbert taking part and footing the bill. As Gilbert observes, "Love addiction, drug addiction, dependency, codependency--it's all the same thing: a disease so tireless and dirty and dignity-consuming that it will never rest until you're ruined."
Gilbert confronts not only the anticipatory grief of losing the love of her life but also the chaotic, terrifying nature of their shared addictions. This unflinching examination of codependency, relapse, and the desperate, often messy, business of caregiving and boundary setting marks a stark departure from the aspirational tone of her previous work. The central liberation in the book's subtitle is not a sudden, sun-drenched epiphany, but a slow, painful untangling of self from another in order to love more fully and more honestly. --Elizabeth DeNoma, executive editor, DeNoma Literary Services, Seattle, Wash.