At the heart of Elizabeth Gilbert’s new memoir is a murder plot. It’s fleeting and sudden, and crucially, it never comes to fruition, but it’s an important checkpoint in her story. It’s vital the reader know that Elizabeth Gilbert, the blonde, bright author behind Eat Pray Love, the zen mastermind and spiritual seeker, had planned to kill her girlfriend by replacing her morphine tablet with sleeping pills, knocking her out for long enough to administer a lethal dose of fentanyl. “That would surely kill her,” Gilbert had hoped.
The confession arrives around the halfway mark of All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation, Gilbert’s new book and a return to the genre of memoir that made her famous with 2006 behemoth Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia. Chronicling her year-long, post-divorce journey around the world, that book (later adapted into a successful film starring Julia Roberts) made a star of its author and set the template for a new type of memoir that would dominate the publishing world in the years to come: white woman finds herself in beautiful, far-flung locales.
