If you are someone who reads multiple news sources a day, a fun way to occasionally spend your time over the last few weeks would have been to watch how critics and commentators have grappled with a hard problem. It is not, admittedly, as hard as the problem of grappling with consciousness. But it is hard enough that the famous assurance by Glennon Doyle, lifestyle coach and thought leader, that “we can do hard things,” remains relevant. I am talking about the problem of how we talk about All the Way to the River, Elizabeth Gilbert’s new memoir – specifically, how to be kinder and more measured about it than the book really deserves.
As you may know if you are one of the 30 million people who bought Eat Pray Love, one of the tens of millions who have read Big Magic or one of her other novels, or simply one of her 1.2 million followers on Instagram, Gilbert recently published a memoir that tells the story of the final years of Rayya Elias, a 57-year-old hair stylist who died of cancer in 2018. This was the woman for whom Gilbert left her husband – the one she met in Bali at the end of the first memoir – and with whom she descended into a drug-addled nightmare after Elias’s diagnosis. It is a horrific tale, one in which Gilbert watches, sometimes helpless, sometimes enabling, as Elias spirals into paranoia and addiction and drags the boundary-less Gilbert down with her. It is also an awesomely, breathtakingly, jaw-droppingly bad book.
