Elizabeth Gilbert’s latest memoir strips away her spiritual guru persona, leaving fans with a blatantly narcissistic protagonist.
Published on Sept. 9, All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation is Gilbert’s first memoir since the international sensation Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia. All the Way to the River details how Gilbert’s best friend’s terminal cancer diagnosis starts the duo on a journey of “consequence-free excitement.” For fans of Eat, Pray, Love, Gilbert’s latest work is a shock, revealing the dark undertones of her self-help-oriented brand.
For those unfamiliar, Eat, Pray, Love follows Gilbert, reeling from a midlife divorce, across Italy, India, and Indonesia in search of personal growth. Some criticize the memoir for culturally appropriating non-Western cultures as a self-reflective tool for the white protagonist’s journey. Complex local cultures are reduced to a backdrop for Gilbert’s personal fulfillment. Misappropriation aside, Eat, Pray, Love was full of “personal revelations” that never felt that revealing, and an ending that was right back where she began, in another marriage.
All the Way to the River proves Gilbert isn’t the protagonist everyone thought she was. The book opens with Gilbert, newly rich, lamenting how much she wants to give back to small businesses in her community, highlighting her own charity work more than the businesses she helped. This self-indulgent depiction of wealth and charity for charity’s sake sets the scene for how out of touch the rest of the memoir is.
When Gilbert’s longtime friend and colleague, Rayya Elias, is diagnosed with terminal cancer, Gilbert’s first instinct isn’t to comfort her. Instead, Gilbert confesses her love to Elias, disturbing the balance of their friendship and her own marriage. Without a second thought, Gilbert divorces her husband and provides Elias, a recovering heroin addict, with enough drugs and alcohol to numb the shock of her diagnosis.
What stuck out from the early chapters was Gilbert’s remarkable selfishness. Elias’s diagnosis was never framed around her, but instead, around what it meant for Gilbert. At first, Gilbert is excited at the prospect of living without any limits, believing the couple’s few short months together would be enough to last her a lifetime. Gilbert’s clearly a talented writer, and she depicts the whirlwind of emotions that came with Elias’s diagnosis well. What made All the Way to the River so disturbing isn’t how it was written, but what was said. Watching Gilbert enable a former addict and fall apart when Elias’s cancer became serious is difficult to read, to say the least.
When Elias is eventually persuaded by her family to undergo chemotherapy for a chance at extending her life, Gilbert begins to lose feelings for her. Reduced to a caregiver instead of a party girl and lover, Gilbert decides the experience has been too costly for her.
The pair’s breakup scene reads like an Instagram caption, with Gilbert claiming she needs to “choose herself.” Rife with internet buzzwords, Gilbert’s journey of self-discovery wasn’t as introspective as she seemed to think it was, taking over 300 pages to accept her partner’s imminent death, and never learning from the arm she caused Elias.
While there’s no right way to discover your close friend is dying, the events described in All the Way to the River are most certainly the wrong way. Though remarkably raw and captivating, Gilbert’s latest memoir centers again around herself and fails to acknowledge the anarchy she leaves in her wake.
If Gilbert’s narcissism wasn’t obvious in Eat, Pray, Love, it should be obvious now. All the Way to the River emphasizes the need for a background check before taking life advice from a random blonde girl on the back of a New York Times bestseller.
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Book review, Culture, Elizabeth Gilbert, Literature, novel
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