Eat Pray Love author Elizabeth Gilbert: 'True grief feels like the end of the world'

In this episode, we talk to Elizabeth Gilbert. Her memoir – Eat Pray Love – sold millions, became a hit movie starring Julia Roberts and encouraged readers to embark on their own spiritual journeys. But for the author, it was the death of her new partner many years later that actually helped her find what she was looking for. That’s all detailed in excruciating fashion in her latest book – All The Way to the River – a difficult and confessional memoir about addiction and loss. Gilbert is the subject of Good Weekend's cover story this week – "Love Addict" – and this podcast is an edited extract of the interview she did for that piece with freelance journalist David Leser.

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Episode Transcript

S1 (00:13):
Hi, I'm Konrad Marshall and from the Sydney Morning Herald
and The Age. Welcome to Good Weekend Talks, a magazine
for your ears, featuring in-depth conversations with fascinating people from
sport and politics, science and culture, business and beyond. Every week,
you can download new episodes in which top journalists from
across our newsrooms talk to compelling people about the definitive

(00:35):
stories of the day. In this episode, we talk to
Elizabeth Gilbert. Her memoir, eat, Pray, Love Sold Millions, became
a hit movie starring Julia Roberts and encouraged readers to
embark on their own spiritual journeys. But for the author,
it was the death of her new partner many years
later that actually helped her find what she was looking for.

(00:56):
That's all detailed in excruciating fashion in her latest book,
All the Way to the River, a difficult and confessional
memoir about addiction and loss. Gilbert is the subject of
our cover story this week, Love Addict. And our podcast
today is an edited extract of the long form interview
she did for that piece with freelance journalist David Lazer.

S2 (01:19):
Hello, Elizabeth Gilbert, welcome to Good Weekend Talks. Thank you
so much for joining us here in Sydney today, Sydney
and Melbourne. Look, I feel like there's so many things
we could talk about here today. And when I was
preparing this interview, I was thinking, well, what should be

(01:39):
our jumping off point? Because really we can we can
talk about writing and creativity and and marriage and commitment
and love and loss and regret but and more. But
we're actually here principally to talk about your latest book,
All the way to the river, which I have to

(02:00):
say is one of the most heart thumping, confessional memoirs
I've ever read. I think it's a it's a beautifully
written book, but it's also it's it's difficult at times.
And one of the things that you say is that
this was your best effort to tell the truth about
what happened between you and Rayya Elias. I hope I

(02:24):
pronounced that correctly. Rayya Elias. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so maybe
we could start there. Who was Rayya Elias? And what
happened between you? Now, I know you could talk forever
with that kind of opening question, but just give us
a brief picture if you could.

S3 (02:44):
No big deal. Um, yeah. I'll just. I'll just summarize
my memoir in a couple sentences. Um, so and also,
thank you for for having me on and it's a
it's a pleasure to get to talk about the book.
I haven't talked about it very much yet, so it's, um.
I don't have canned answers yet. Good. And I think

(03:05):
that's good. Good. Um, so I'll be thinking of answers
as you think of questions. So, Rayya Elias was, um,
somebody who I knew for, um, 20 years. We started off.
She was my hairdresser, and we were sort of client
and professional. And then over time, we became friends and

(03:27):
and then over time, we became social friends. And then
over more time, we became really good friends and then
neighbors and then best friends. And then she became something
that I no longer could figure out what to call, um,
other than to say that she was my person. Um,
my favorite person and my my anchor. And, um, that

(03:50):
was both really beautiful and also extremely confusing because I
was married to a man who I loved very much,
and Ray was gay. And I'm not really. And, you know, like,
it just it didn't I didn't know what to do
with the fact that that as the years went by,
I loved her and needed her more and more. Um.

S2 (04:14):
And of course. Sorry to interrupt there, but the man
you loved was the man we all met. Um, in
a way, um, in a in a fictitious way, through eat, pray, love, uh,
with the name Philippe. And that's who you had married
in around 2008, 2007, 2008.

S3 (04:33):
No earlier than. Well, was it 2007, I think is
is when we actually got married. But we've been together since, um, 2004. Yeah. Um,
and it was a very peaceful and stable and beautiful life.
And actually, the three of us were all best friends, and, um,
and I just tucked those feelings away and decided they

(04:55):
never needed to be known by anybody, not least of
all me. Um, and I sort of compartmentalized it into
a safe space. And then in 2016, Raya was diagnosed
with terminal pancreatic and liver cancer and told that she
had six months to live. And at that point, it
was no longer possible for me to to any more

(05:17):
be able to hide or even want to hide, um,
the true feelings that I had for her. And it
just became untenable to not be her partner at that point. Um,
the thought of her going to her death, never knowing
how much I loved her, um, and also the thought
of her going to her death without me being able
to be there, um, and and to be the person

(05:42):
at her side through that as she walked in her
own words all the way to the river, um, was
just impossible. And so, in very short order, there was
a suddenly life went from seemingly not very dramatic to
extremely dramatic. Um, within a matter of weeks, it was
I'm leaving my marriage. I have to go be with her,

(06:02):
and we will spend the last months of her life together. Um,
and and what happened is that we had a few
really incredible, romantic, beautiful months and then a lot of
horrible months. Yeah. Um, not only because of the terminal cancer,
but also Raya, who was an addict in recovery, um,

(06:24):
a speedball, heroin and cocaine addict with years of recovery
behind her, relapsed, um, during her during her time of
cancer to go back to being just as serious an
addict as she had been when she was living on
the streets shooting heroin and cocaine in the 80s and 90s.
And that wasn't what anybody had expected. And so the

(06:46):
story took another turn. Um, and that's what this book
is about, you know, it's and but it's not only
about addiction and about death and about grief. It's also
an unfolding kind of forensic examination into what was my
role in this? How did I end up in this? Um,

(07:07):
and what has been my history with, um, what I
now call love addiction? Um, and, and extreme blackout, skid
row codependency? Um, that has caused me all sorts of
pain in my life, including, but not limited to this story. Um,
so it's not just a story about the degradation that

(07:28):
she underwent during that restoration of her, of her addiction,
but the degradation that I underwent, um, a sort of
abandoning myself completely to the care of somebody who then
abandoned me.

S2 (07:41):
Would it be fair to say that you you knew
a lot of this about yourself? Because in eat, pray,
Love You, you were very candid. You were very vulnerable.
You talked about how you'd gone from really from the
time that you were 15 through your teenage years and
your adolescence, barely without a breath. You'd always had a

(08:03):
boy or a later a man. Sometimes both in your company,
often overlapping that you you needed that affirmation. And you,
you might have even said, you know, there was a
kind of a love addiction. And I remember also ten years,
nearly ten years after eat, Pray, love was published, and

(08:25):
you wrote a piece for the for the New York
Times called The Confessions of a Seduction Addict. So was
it like something new was revealed to you in the
collision of, say that love addiction with raya's drug addiction?
Did something new manifest that you hadn't seen before?

S3 (08:48):
Not new. Devastatingly familiar. Exactly. Not new. Like the same
story again. Um, that I have lived so many times,
which is? I'm going to pour myself completely into you, um,
and then wake up absolutely empty and depleted, devastated, bewildered, puzzled,

(09:10):
and also blaming you for having left me empty, despite
the fact that I was the one who did that.
And as you say, it's not that I was unaware
of these behaviours I'd written about them. I'd been talking
about them in therapy for years. Um, I even used
the language of addiction when I described myself in eat, pray, love, um,

(09:30):
to describe what it felt like to live in my
experience in these, in these relationships, um, that were, that
were so devastating where the line gets crossed. I think
for me, from love to love, addiction had become somebody
who I believed I could not live without, um, somebody

(09:52):
who I relied on emotionally to such a degree that
that I would would have said a world without this person.
And it is a world that is not worth living
in for me. And I don't actually know how to
manage my life without this person. Um, so so that's
even before long before we were romantic partners, or had

(10:14):
ever spoken or acted in any way about love, that
line had been, that line had been crossed. In other words,
I had made her into my higher power.

S2 (10:22):
Now, you say in this book that there are not
a lot of women who would publicly declare, even, maybe
privately declare, that there are sex and love addicts. Why
did you feel you needed to do that or wanted
to do that?

S3 (10:37):
Well, it would have been nice to know about this. Um,
you know, over the the 35 years that I struggled
with these behaviors, it would have been. It would have
been nice if somebody had taken me aside and said, honey,
this is the thing that you are, and there's a
place where you can go where there are a lot
of other people who act like this, and there's a

(10:59):
program of recovery that's available for you. Like, I mean, God, but,
you know, and because of the fact I'd heard of
sex addiction. Um, but my view of it and I've
talked to a lot of women who who are in
recovery for sex and love addiction about how they stayed
away from those rooms because it seemed like it was
mostly men talking about prostitutes and porn. Um, and, and,

(11:22):
you know, acting out in ways that didn't feel like
what we do. Um, not to say that there are
not women addicted to porn. There certainly are. Um, but
they were talking about massage parlors and prostitutes and porn
and and cheating in these ways that were all, all
very much focused on sex. And what what in my case,

(11:43):
the way I act out, I use sex, but I
use it as a tool to get what what I've
heard called lava love, attention, validation and affection. Um, so
it's a means to an end. It's not the end
in itself. And that's that's the need that I'm looking

(12:03):
to to see fulfilled.

S2 (12:05):
I imagine love, addiction or any addiction causes a lot
of damage to oneself and to others. But what what
does love and sex addiction, what kind of damage does
it cause to firstly to oneself? And what kind of
damage can it cause to others? Or what kind of
damage do you think you caused others?

S3 (12:22):
I think I can I can kind of back into
that question by, by sort of answering the opposite, which
is to, to define for me what a sober day is,
you know, because I'm living my sober life one day
at a time, like, like any addict. So sobriety for
me is any day where I'm not using another human

(12:45):
being as a drug and using another human being as
a sedative, or using another human being as a stimulant,
or using a couple different human beings as a sedative
and a stimulant. Um, or trying to find somebody who
will be a sedative and a stimulant. In other words,
the same thing that I watched when I watched Rhea

(13:06):
in her cocaine and opioid addiction. Toward the end of
her life, as awful as it was, there was also
something very fascinating about living in the house with an
active drug addict, because her entire day was about trying
to get her levels right, and she had been a
speedball heroin junkie for most of her life before she

(13:26):
found recovery, which is mixing a stimulant and a sedative.
You're mixing cocaine with heroin, and all you're trying to
do is feel right, you know? Um, and and so
a little too much cocaine, and it's. You're overstimulated, a
little too much heroin, and you're you're dead. No. So
you're trying to like, you know, she was just like

(13:48):
a chemist, you know, and she was also, you know,
adding into that all these other substances, alcohol and nicotine,
you know, all the other prescriptions that had been given
to her, you know, in, in her, in her hospice. Um,
but on a slower scale, like, that's how it looks
to be an immediate drug addict for a love addict
that's happening over the course of years, where I'm just

(14:10):
trying to find the exact right person who's going to
be able to externally change, like, act in a way,
externally so that my internal emotional scale finally feels okay
because it never did. You know, it never did. And
so if you can deliver unto me whatever it is,

(14:33):
either excitement, drama, romance, security, some sort of a combination
of both, you know, maybe I'll be able to have
a good day, right? That's how I use people, and
the way that the reason that it's so hurtful, it's
degrading to me because it is like all addicts, I
give my power away to that substance and I'll do

(14:53):
anything to get it. So I'll do lots of degrading
and unwise things. But it's also tremendously harmful to the
person who's being used, um, and, and used perhaps under
the guise of what might feel like love or what
might look like love, but is actually based in a
deep dependency where I'm going to ask you to meet

(15:15):
my needs for me, because I don't know how to
do that for myself. Um, and I and maybe don't
even believe that I can.

S2 (15:21):
I'm tempted to ask you, but isn't that just two
soulmates meeting? It can't. It be that you you feel
soothed by someone, you feel stimulated by someone. You feel
excited in their presence, you brought alive by that particular person.
They become a fixture in one's life. Or are you
saying that this is just an exaggerated version of who

(15:42):
we all are capable of being.

S3 (15:45):
I would say the difference between what you're describing and
what I have done is the difference between having a
nice glass of white wine on a summer's evening and
going on a bender where three days later you wake
up in Las Vegas and all your money is gone
and you don't know how you got there. Right. So?
So that's the difference. It's it's a difference between being

(16:06):
able to maintain your dignity, um, maintain honesty, integrity and
respect versus losing all of that. Um, losing all of
that and making a bunch of decisions that you might
not make if your dependency needs were not quite so extreme.

S2 (16:26):
I want to ask you about contradiction, because when I
hear you talking like this, I think, oh, she's the
nice woman who? The lovely woman who was played by
Julia Roberts in eat, pray, love and and and she's
been described as a Labrador, meets a golden retriever, meets
a barnacle. She's the planetaries most planetary, life affirming loving.

(16:50):
I actually read a New York Times review of you
saying you may be the nicest person, nicest person in
in print, um, man or woman. And it's the same
with Rhea. Like she was all of those things you've described.
But she was an extraordinary musician as well. And she
was one of the the boldest, most courageous people. And

(17:13):
the more I read the book and the more I've
read about you in it seems like that's what you
do for us as your reader. You help us make
peace with our contradictions, or you help us find integrate
a contradictions in some sort of way. And I'm reminded

(17:35):
of the, the, the famous Walt Whitman Do I contradict myself? Well.
Very well. I do contradict myself, I contain multitudes. Is
that something that that you sit with? Uh, a lot?

S3 (17:49):
Yeah. And and another word for that is paradox. And
whenever I'm in the presence of paradox, I feel like
I'm in the presence of the divine. Um, like, if
I can, if I can expand my heart and my
mind enough to, like, build a big enough arena of
consciousness to be able to contain, accept and contain my

(18:12):
own paradoxes and the paradoxes and contradictions of others. Suddenly
there's a lot of room. You know, I feel like
God's in there, you know, because so much of this
whole entire life is paradox anyway. You know, like, it's
beautiful and it's terrible and, you know, we're we're mortal
and we're immortal and we're, you know, like, wherever those

(18:33):
paradoxes occur, I feel like mystery occurs. But I got
teary eyed as you asked that question because I was
just working with a, um, with an addict today as
a sponsor, and we're reading from the Big Book of
Alcoholics Anonymous, which is the beautiful central texts that still,
despite its creaky old 1930s language, gets it, you know,

(18:54):
like really gets what, what addiction is. And one of
the lines in the book was a doctor saying, um,
about one of the addicts who eventually got sober in AA. Um,
he said, if you had come to my hospital, he
worked at a sanatorium in New York. And he said,
if you had come to my hospital in the condition
that you used to be in, I would have turned

(19:15):
you away. Um, it's not just that addicts like you
are hopeless. You people like you are too. Heartbreaking. That
was the word that he used. And I got emotional,
you know, teary eyed when I read it today with
my sponsee. And I get teary eyed thinking about how
heartbreaking these contradictions are. And anybody who's ever I've ever

(19:37):
been in the grip of addiction or has loved somebody,
which includes almost all of us who has either. You know,
hardly anyone's going to get through this life without being
impacted by addiction of their own or someone else's. It's heartbreaking. Um,
and it's heartbreaking because you're because of just exactly what
you said. How is it possible that this wonderful, wonderful

(19:59):
person with all these incredible qualities is also this person
who is lying and leading a double life? And, you know,
Ray used to.

S2 (20:09):
Talking about Ray now, not, you.

S3 (20:11):
Know, me too.

S2 (20:12):
You too.

S3 (20:13):
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Um, running secret programs, kind of behind
the scenes, you know, like that's what addicts do. There's
a line I quote in the book from Garcia marquez
that says, everybody, every man has a public life, a
private life and a secret life. And, um, and I
remember a dear, wise friend of mine when I quoted
that to him saying yes, because for a lot of us,

(20:36):
if people found out about our secret life, it would
destroy both our public life and our private life. Private
life being your friends and family, public life, being yourself
out in the world, secret life being that little thing
you do that you sure don't want anyone to know
that you do.

S2 (20:54):
And that's where addiction quietly flourishes.

S3 (20:56):
And that's where addiction, like a mold or a virus,
just loves that darkness and loves that secrecy. Um, and,
and is doing push ups, and they're getting stronger by
the day while you're out there presenting as though you're
something else. And that's why it's so heartbreaking. Um, and
and you're powerless over it, you know, you're powerless over it.

S2 (21:16):
But the idea of contradiction, you don't have to be
an addict to be riven with contradictions, because kind of
we all are. And I think that's one of the
things that you, you do is you articulate your own
contradictions and in this case, Reyes, but you also allow
us to sort of feel a little better about our contradictions,

(21:38):
because often we get shamed for the contradictions that we
we have. And I think there's a passage of writing,
I don't know where it came from, but you, these
are your words, the most peaceful people that I know
and the most wise people that I know are the
ones that have created enough internal space to be able
to allow all the parts of themselves to coexist, despite

(22:01):
the contradictions.

S3 (22:03):
Yeah.

S2 (22:03):
So you don't need to be an addict for that.
That's just all of us.

S3 (22:06):
Oh, no, you sure don't. You know, I mean, those are,
you know, that's that's that arena of acceptance that that
I was speaking about. And I feel that for me,
the the quickest way for me to be able to
access that much spaciousness is just exactly what you've pointed out,
which is this is our shared human experience. Um, you know,

(22:28):
this is our shared human experience is that it's very
difficult to be here in Earth school. It's very difficult
to be a soul embedded in a incarnated in a
meat body of a giant ape. It's very difficult to.
It's weird. It's profoundly weird. It's like it's difficult to
be dropped into a particular time and space, into a

(22:49):
particular family and be like, who are these people? This, this,
this is my family. A particular culture, you know, to
to try to manage your urges against the parts of
you that want to be restrained. It's it's it's not.
Nobody nobody passes through the experience of human life and
says that was a breeze.

S2 (23:10):
You know? No one gets off unscathed.

S3 (23:12):
Nobody. I don't care how much privilege you hold or
or how good you might appear to be handling it
or doing it. No, nobody moves through this plane without
having to experience those contradictions and that suffering and that shame.
And when I think of it that way, it opens
up my heart to myself. Um. Like I just become

(23:36):
another bozo on the bus, just trying to do my best.
And in a place that's, you know, on a planet
that's hard to live on. Um, in a body that's
hard to live on and a mind that's hard to manage. Um, so, so, yes, I,
I have a line in the book where I say
that perhaps an an addict is just an extreme version
of all of us. Yes. And and my hope for

(23:57):
people reading the book is, is that indeed they come
away with a greater sense of, of self-compassion for, um,
how difficult the journey can be.

S2 (24:06):
I mean, you say you say more than that, actually.
It's actually quite lovely. What you what you say that
we're all just trying to survive our minds, our histories,
our dilemmas, our destinies, our days. And it reminded me
when I read that of my favorite one of my
favorite Irish poets, the late John O'Donohue.

S3 (24:26):
And and he loves him.

S2 (24:28):
And and he said. it's just so strange being here.

S3 (24:33):
The weirdest thing in the universe. It's so weird. And
we keep looking for other things out there like this
and can't find one yet. You know, like, not only
is it profoundly weird to be here, but we're kind
of here. We're kind of looking like for the minute,
like the only thing, the only place where this is happening.
And that's why I refer to Earth as Earth school like,

(24:55):
and the way that I like to imagine it. Um,
and of course, this is just my imagination, but that
it's it's a school for souls. Um, we choose to
come here and to incarnate so that we can have
these profound experiences of learning. And of course, there's no
faster way to learn than through immediate, devastating, abject failure.

(25:17):
I mean, that is the greatest teacher if you use
it as such.

S2 (25:20):
That's why I loved, um, I went to your big
magic workshop in in Sydney late last year. I was
one of about five men in a room of in
a town hall of about 2000 women. And, um, you
talked you quoted Mark Twain. Uh, great quote about, you know,

(25:43):
if you if you pick up a cat by the tail,
that's probably the only way you're going to learn that
lesson about not picking a cat up by the tail.
And in this earth school, as you describe it, it
seems like you've picked up the cat by the tail
a lot of times before you learnt whatever it is

(26:06):
you needed to learn. I mean, you said before 35
years you've been behaving this way, but you didn't necessarily
have a name for it, but you kept making the
same mistake. You kept picking up the cat by the tail.
Is that is that what we do?

S3 (26:20):
Younger souls, I would say, um, like those of us,
you know, like that's a that, you know, in, in,
in this kind of a divine view of the cosmos
that would look like the behavior of somebody who hasn't,
hasn't been here on Earth a bunch of times and
is still like, but what happens if I put the
fork in the in the, you know, outlet and like,
but what happens if I put the fork in the

(26:41):
outlet again? You know, like, certainly somebody who's, who's wiser
or maybe who in my case, I'm choosing my words
really carefully here because I don't want to I don't
want to assign blame. Um, there are certain kinds of
trauma that I think interrupt our clear thinking and certainly

(27:05):
lead people into compulsive behaviors that continue to harm them. Um,
so maybe somebody who didn't have those particular traumas might
not have to act out the way that that I
apparently have had to act out. Um, I don't know.
And and there's a level at which it doesn't really matter.

(27:28):
There's a there's a line I love in 12 step
recovery that says discovery is not recovery, which means you
can learn everything you want about this stuff, but that's
not going to recover you from it. And and, I mean,
I wrote an entire book about marriage and I thought
that made me divorce proof. I mean, I wrote that
book so that I would be divorce proof. I was like,

(27:49):
I'm not getting another divorce. I'm not having another relationship breakup.

S2 (27:52):
You're talking about committed.

S3 (27:54):
Yeah. And I spent like three years basically studying enough to.
I could have earned a master's degree, um, in maybe
even a doctorate. And the history of marriage, the the
psychology of marriage, the sociology of marriage, the statistics about marriage.
I was like, I'm going to arm myself because I
got married so casually when I was 24. And so

(28:15):
in such a devastatingly unthought through way. And I'm like,
I'm gonna do the opposite of that this time, and
I'm going to just become a scholar of this. And I'm,
you know, knowledge is power. And in many regards it is.
But in in in in the nature of addiction, it
doesn't argue against your addiction. Um, it doesn't arm you

(28:36):
against these compulsive behaviors that come up from these shadowy
places in you that before you know it, it's engulfed
you again. I've got friends who are recovered, driving, driving alcohol,
addicts who are like, oh, they, you know, they had
to wake up. They had to wake up in the
back of an ambulance having flatlined like 9 or 10
or 15 or 26 times, you know, before they were

(28:59):
finally like, maybe I'm at my rock bottom, maybe I've
picked this cat up by the tail, you know, and
those people who love them observe that behavior. And it's
it looks like insanity because it is.

S2 (29:11):
Maybe they thought that if you pick up a Siamese cat.
I think you said this, it might be different.

S3 (29:16):
Yeah. Maybe if I pick up like a kitten. Maybe
if I pick up, uh, one of those cats with
a very short tail. Maybe if I pick up a
cat who's heavily sedated. Maybe if I pick up a,
you know, maybe if I go to veterinary school, learn
about cats, you know, but but the same thing just
keeps happening.

S2 (29:42):
Okay, so so here you are in 2016 declaring your
love for your best friend. It's been percolating really since
2000 when you met her. It's been growing and you
haven't named it. But she's your best friend, your companion,
your aide de camp, your she accompanies you on the

(30:04):
red carpet, walks on for eat, pray, love. She travels
all over the world with you, including coming to Australia.
The All About Women conference where you appeared with her
in here in Australia, and you both declare your love
to each other and you end up in this relationship,
which at first is wondrous. It's its joy. I mean,

(30:27):
it's it's informed, of course, by the, the diagnosis of
of a terminal illness. And she's given six months to live.
But am I right in saying the first few months
were were joyful, joyous, and celebratory of life and love?
When and how did it turn dark?

S3 (30:48):
Without denying any of the beauty and the romance and
the connection and the excitement and the strange joy that
we experienced in those months, um, heightened by the death
sentence and this feeling that we're just going to ride
or die, um, like, all the way to the river.

(31:12):
We're going to go all the way with each other
and and also without. I want to make it really
clear there's I can actually honestly say this. There's no
part of my history that I would change. Um, so
without saying, you know, I wish that hadn't happened or,
and without suggesting that there was that there's something is fundamentally,

(31:34):
morally at the core, wrong with either one of us.
I will say that the darkness began long before that
for me. Um, and, and and there's a there's a
sort of fascinating, I think, parallel between me and Rhea
at that point, the darkness began with my secrecy about

(31:58):
the level of my dependency on her. And and it
began with, and I say this in a very loving
way toward myself, the the tremendous bribes that I was.
What do you do with the pride that I was
offering to her as as a means of keeping her near, um.

(32:22):
I put her up in a beautiful home, and this
is when we were friends. You know, I, I took
her on these incredibly glamorous trips around the world. I
promised her that I would introduce her to a publisher
for her book. I promoted her music like I used.
I used everything that I have, and I had a

(32:43):
lot as the person who wrote eat, pray, love. During
those years, I was quite flush with money and influence. Um,
and I used those things innocently. Again, I'm not, I'm not,
you know, throwing myself under the bus here, but I
can see it now. It's always easier to see it
in retrospect. I use those things in ways that that

(33:04):
were not in integrity, in order, knowing what her longings
were for glamour, knowing what her longings were to see
the world, knowing what her longings were to be known
as an artist building up a dependency from her on
to me, you know, and and at the time, I
would have defended that as generosity. And I am a

(33:28):
really generous person. Um, but the motive was, I want
to make sure that you don't go anywhere. So. So
that's the seeds of the darkness. That darkness was, was
there probably from the moment that I realized how powerfully
protective she was and that when she was in the room,

(33:50):
my fear levels dropped because Raya could handle anybody. And
my deep seated fear of people and their volatility and
their danger was something I had carried my entire life.
But when Raya was in the room, I did not
have to feel that fear because she there was nobody

(34:11):
that she could not manage, you know, um, and there
was no drama that she couldn't defuse. There was no
bully that she couldn't corner and shut down. I mean,
she she had this incredibly powerful, calming presence. Um, on
me and and I was like, I need that. And
so I instead of being extremely candid about that, um, and,

(34:34):
and speaking about that, I, what I did was I'm
going to keep my marriage, but I'm going to manipulate
this person to make sure that she's always around, because
I don't like the way I feel when she's not here.
And I like the way that I feel that she's there.
So so we the relationship grew up out of that,
you know, and and similarly, the parallel that I'm talking

(34:55):
about is that, you know, Raya was this paragon of
recovery for a long time, um, a miracle story, who
had flatlined three times as a heroin addict and had
lived in jails and institutions, had been homeless. I mean,
she had been a real, real low bottom addict, and
she had found recovery and gotten clean. But I would say,

(35:16):
I mean, I can't really say for sure because she
was doing it secretly like me. She was keeping secrets,
but she had secretly started drinking, um, maybe ten years
into her, 8 or 10 years into her recovery, and
then not so secretly, and then started using other substances
as well. And she was kind of keeping that a
secret and sow the seeds of her relapse, like her

(35:37):
relapse into cocaine addiction, I think started with her relapse
into alcohol addiction. Years earlier, she was building toward something.
She was opening doors up again where addiction could come
back in. And I say this just with so much mercy,
because it's not what either of us wanted to be doing.

S2 (36:00):
So neither of you would have ever wanted it that way.

S3 (36:04):
You didn't want that. Like, we didn't want to be
sneaky and manipulative and, um, out of integrity, you know, like,
nobody wants that. Unless you're a sociopath. But that's what.
That's what unhealed need makes you do.

S2 (36:21):
And how much do you think actually, the success of eat, pray,
Love enabled some of this stuff?

S3 (36:29):
Well, it made it easier. Right. I had I had
a lot of resources. Um, if you want to buy love,
it helps to be making millions of dollars. Um, so.

S2 (36:39):
And you'd sold. I think it's by today's number. Uh,
today's number is about 30 million copies of eat, pray, love. Yeah, yeah.
So you had a lot of money to splash around?

S3 (36:50):
Yeah. And I also am. And this is again where
the contradictions happen. I also am a really generous person,
and I. You know, Raya was not the only person
during those years who's, who's art I was supporting and who's, um,
you know, who's whose creative work. I was encouraging and,
you know, in many cases whose bills I was paying,
whose emergencies I was responding to. I mean, and some

(37:11):
of that is my codependency and some of that is
my my just sense of justice and wanting to help
people and wanting to to love people. Um, but but yes,
I would say it's it certainly did make it easier.

S2 (37:25):
I have a writer's question for you. I just wonder
how difficult or not it is to revisit the darkness
and write about it as though you're back in it,
and then to be here as you are now with

(37:48):
us talking about it. How do you do that without
retraumatizing yourself? Can you do that without retraumatizing yourself?

S3 (37:59):
Others may be able to, um. But it's, uh. Yeah,
I didn't I didn't want to write this book. I mean,
Raya had, um, asked me to. She wanted me to.
She encouraged me to tell the truth about everything. She
was somebody who was so fearless in the face of
the truth, especially when she was in her sobriety. Um,

(38:22):
after she died, I just couldn't get far enough away
from it, you know? Um, I just I just threw
myself back into life, and, like, it's the last thing
in the entire world I wanted to talk about or
think about or write about. And I wouldn't have known
how to write this book immediately after Raya died, because
I think at that point, it probably would have come

(38:43):
out as a story about a really nice person who
a bad thing happened to, you know? Um, because I,
I still couldn't see what my role was in the
insanity of my life. Um, I had to go pick
up a little bit more insanity after that, before I finally.
And and I had to be 12. Stepped by a

(39:06):
friend who has recovery in another 12 step program, who
sat me down and said, like, I've been watching you
hurt yourself this way forever. And, you know, I think
that you might need a recovery program for this. Um,
and I could finally hear that it was finally offered,
and I could finally hear it. But no, I didn't
want to write it. I wrote two books in the meantime. Um,
I wrote City of Girls, and then I wrote this

(39:27):
this other book called The Snow Forest, that I ended
up pulling from publication for, um, for other reasons, but.

S2 (39:35):
Well, because the Ukrainian, your Ukrainian readership didn't want a
novel from you set in Russia at this time. Is
that right?

S3 (39:42):
Yeah, that's the simple. That's the simple version of it.
And it just it wasn't the right time. It wasn't
the right time in history to publish that book. It
was a novel about Russia. And that felt very clear
to me once, once that was made clear by the
Ukrainian readers. But all of which is to say that I,
you know, I wrote two entire massively researched mega novels, um,

(40:06):
between when Raya died and when I wrote All the
Way to the river. Um, but then what I found
is that I kept writing kind of around it. I
started writing poetry about it. Um, I wrote a sort
of a novella about it that was sort of like
a modern day ghost story called Nobody Leaves. That was maybe, uh,

(40:30):
100 pages. And. And I was like, this is I just,
you know, finally what it was was I was like,
you're not telling the truth. You know, you're not telling
the truth. You're you're telling around the truth. You're trying
to figure out how to talk about this without talking
about it. And one of the things that I loved

(40:50):
about Ray, and I quote her on it multiple times
in the book, the quote for which she was most
famous was, um, she she loved the truth. And she
used to say, the truth has legs. No matter what
else happens, it looks like you might be pulling it
up right now. Maybe you've got the exact quote, but anyway,
I don't know it by heart, but it's the, um.
The truth has legs. It always stands no matter what

(41:14):
else happens. When all the bullshit and the drama and
the confusion and the manipulation are all gone. At the
end of the day, there is one thing that will
always just stand, and it's the truth. And she used
to say to me, since we're all going to end
up there, because eventually the only thing left in the
room is going to be the truth. We all it

(41:36):
just always ends up that way, since we're all going
to end up there. I figure we might as well
just start with it. And that's how she would always start.
Any difficult conversation was like, let's just start with the truth.
Let's just lay it on the table to the best
of our capacity. And so I sort of heard her
voice in me encouraging that and saying, like, don't talk

(41:57):
around this book and don't write this book. Don't write
this book in some sort of half assed way, like,
write the shit out of this thing, like go full
punk rock with it. Lay it out there like it
doesn't help anybody if it's not the full truth. And, um,
but that said, it was incredibly hard. David, um, I
went away. The hardest part was the middle part, the

(42:18):
the sort of awful descent into the ninth circle of
hell when she started using again. And, um, I went
to New Orleans and I stayed at a friend's house
who has this very, like, old haunted house. And I
went there in the winter and just stayed there in
the pouring rain, and for about three weeks worked on
that middle section and just cried and cried and took

(42:41):
like four baths a day and went for walks in
the rain, and then came back at it. And and
every morning I have a very deep, spiritual, deep meaning, long,
long lasting spiritual practice where every morning I sort of
I pray and I download messages from my higher power
about what I'm supposed to be doing, and I, I
kept asking if I could get out of this. I

(43:01):
was like, I really don't want to do this. And, um,
and I have a very indulgent higher power, who's lots
of times lets me off the hook about stuff, but
was very clear. Girl, get to work. I'll see you
at your desk. This is an assignment. Um. Like I
see your suffering. And this is hard. Too bad. I
need you to write this, and I need you to
write this very honestly. And I felt that to be true.

(43:22):
And I feel that it's an act of service, that
the writing of this book, more than anything I've ever written,
is ultimately an act of loving service.

S2 (43:30):
Liz, I'm I'm tempted to say that, um, everything you've
just said now is, is kind of it's the reason
for why millions of people adore you. And millions of
people do adore you. They they buy your books in
the tens of millions. And it's possibly because in This

(43:50):
Is Me now postulating a theory as to why. But
you articulate for them us, um, things that we try
and find words for. Or you take Risks that people
may not want to take themselves. But you dare to
be brave and then you write about it, you know,

(44:13):
sort of all the pitfalls, um, as well as the triumphs, um,
mini or major triumphs. But I'm wondering why you think
you wake up every day as Elizabeth Gilbert and you've
got this global following. Why do you think you're so adored?

S3 (44:30):
Well, I think something happened with eat, pray, love, because
it wasn't like that before. I mean, eat, Pray Love
was my fourth book. And, um, prior to that, interestingly,
I had only written books about men. Um, I was
certainly extremely fixated on men, especially in my 20s. And

(44:51):
so I was and I was writing for GQ and
I was writing for spin magazine, I was writing for Esquire.
So I was writing about I was writing about the
experience of men. Um, I was writing profiles from the
point of view told by a woman who loves men. Um,
so so that's that was my kind of. That was
my career for a good ten years. Um, and it

(45:12):
was really interesting, but it certainly didn't, you know, I
was successful at it, but it didn't. But it didn't
earn me what happened? Um, after eat, pray, love. And
and I want to say that truly, I think that
the simplest and most honest answer to that is that
we kind of can't know. Um, because I certainly wasn't

(45:33):
the first person who ever wrote a divorce memoir, and
I wasn't the first person who ever wrote a travel memoir. Um,
I wasn't the first person who ever wrote a spiritual memoir. Um,
there's been a lot of books like that, and there
have been, you know, there were a lot of stories
like that before and after. So I we can only
speculate as to why that one was the one that ignited.

(45:56):
But when I meet women and it's almost always women,
but not always, And I thank you for being one
of the five men at the workshop in Sydney last year.
That's truly courageous. Um, and it's it's kind of it's
emotionally courageous. It's, um, you know, I was asking people
to do really intense, deep emotional work that weekend, and it's,

(46:17):
it's something that a lot of men have trouble with.
So it's really beautiful that you were there, um, with
the four others.

S2 (46:24):
Well, thanks for saying it was probably ten. It wasn't.
It was probably 10 or 15.

S3 (46:27):
Ten, but.

S2 (46:28):
There weren't that many.

S3 (46:29):
We're not exaggerating that much. You know, it's I mean,
that's typically how it is, and that's fine. Whoever's there is,
who's supposed to be there, I don't really care. But
I am touched when men come. But it's what the
women say is that eat, pray love was a permission
slip for them. Um, and women, I think, have to

(46:52):
be given permission and and haven't been given much of it,
you know, um, the, the scope of what women are
permitted to do is still globally pretty narrow and historically
has been like almost like almost insignificant. What women are
allowed and and what you're told you're allowed. And that

(47:18):
book gave millions of women permission to say I also
have these feelings. I also would rather be in Italy
right now. Like I also am seeking God. I also
have a marriage that looks perfectly good, but I'm slowly

(47:40):
dying in it. Um. I also was promised that if
I had a wedding and a kid and a home,
that I would be fulfilled, and I am. I've never
been more unhappy. Um, but this is not to say
that this is the experience of every woman. I also

(48:01):
am dying in this job where I don't feel seen. Um.
I'm also full of longing for something bigger and and
what I love hearing are the stories of what that
book made people do. Um, and, and those stories are,
are so moving to me. And I'm so grateful to
have been the vehicle through, you know, or the mirror.

(48:24):
I don't even know what the proper metaphor would be.
It has so far, long ago passed being about anything
having to do with me. Like it's it's so that
book so long ago, like, took flight and became its
own thing that people needed and delivered to people whatever
they might have needed from it. Um, so I, I

(48:48):
don't know, but I'm just grateful to have been a
part of it because it's incredibly touching for me to
hear those stories. Um, and, and to continue to be
somebody who I hope gives people in general, women in particular,
permission to to be human, to recover, to fail, to, um,

(49:12):
to forgive themselves and to seek something greater.

S2 (49:17):
Well, I know something that you gave me at that
big magic workshop, which was I think I'm one of
many people who grew up on the idea that to
that I wanted to be a writer, and but to
write and to write well is difficult. And it's it's
painful that the joy of writing is kind of in

(49:39):
having written, but to actually be, to enjoy the creative process,
that's that's a new idea. And I think for me
and that you, you almost proselytize that idea that that
creativity doesn't have to be this kind of we don't
have to be Baudelaire and suffering for our art. We

(49:59):
can actually be grateful and joyous in our creativity.

S3 (50:05):
Yeah. I've been I've been beating that drum for a
long time. And, um, I feel that, uh, you know,
for most of history, I think people made art out
of a place of curiosity and joy and and also
as a, as a thing to be absorbed into. This
is the beautiful thing about, about creative work of any

(50:26):
kind is that you get you can get lost in it.
You can you can be given a tremendous vacation from
being you. It is so hard to walk around all day,
all life having to be this person, you know, and
it's like, I just have a break from having to
be inside of this mind and having this identity and

(50:47):
losing yourself in even the simplest kind of creativity, like
I've been doing, like the most rudimentary childlike embroidery lately
while I'm on zoom meetings. You know, just because it's
a pleasure to have to do something with my hands.
I mean, we're meant to make things with our hands. We.
It feels good. My beloved friend, um, Martha Beck, the

(51:10):
the teacher and writer and kind of sage, just wrote
a book called Beyond Anxiety. And she studied. She's got, like,
triple degrees from Harvard, and she studied, um, the nature
of anxiety and all the latest neuroscience on anxiety. And
she was able to she kept calling me during her
research and saying everything you were talking about in my book,
Big Magic about creativity is is correct. You were talking

(51:32):
about it from an artistic standpoint, but it's correct from
a scientific standpoint, because the the way that she was
explaining it to me is that that the part of
the brain that experiences fear and anxiety is balanced on
the other side of the brain by the part that
experiences curiosity and creativity. It's a toggle switch. Either one
one of them is on or the other one is on.

(51:53):
You're either in your curiosity and your creativity or you're
in your anxiety. And so what she was she was
putting forth was that the opposite of anxiety is not
being calm, peaceful and quiet. The opposite of anxiety is creativity.
Doing something. Making something. Um, and I and I think
that the German romantics kind of killed that. I think they,

(52:17):
I think they created this literally romantic idea of the dying, struggling, suffering,
neurotic artist. And they made it look kind of beautiful
in a sort of goth way. And I think people
latched on to that, and it became a badge of honor.
And I don't think it has to be like that.

S2 (52:34):
Just one last thing I'd love to ask you about.
I mean, I could talk to you forever, but it's, um,
the other thing you mentioned at that big magic workshop is,
in terms of creativity, just how ideas come to us,
but also can leave us or an idea, An idea
whose time has come. Now, you talked about a particular

(52:58):
idea that you had for a novel, and it was
going to be set in Brazil, and it was about,
I think, a widow from Minnesota. But life took over,
and two years of work or whatever on this novel
kind of got shelved. And then you met Ann Patchett,

(53:24):
the great American writer who's become a friend of yours.
Just tell us what happened there in terms of what
can happen to an idea and kind of the idea
of the magic of how ideas are almost. It felt
like the way you described it, they're almost entities. They're

(53:44):
there for us to seize. And if we don't seize them,
somebody else will seize them 100%.

S3 (53:51):
And I don't mean that to be threatening because people
already have a lot of anxiety about creativity. Actually, it
should be reassuring. There's a lot more of them right there.
I think they feel like the way I have always
experienced creative ideas is that they are, as you say,
entities is a perfect word for it. They have spirit.
They have will, they have desire, they want to be

(54:12):
made manifest. And they circle the world looking for human
collaborators because we are pretty good at making stuff, um,
when we're inspired. Um, and, and we're the only species
that does it. I mean, there's some there's some weaver birds,
and there's, like, you can find slight traces of artistic tendencies,
but for the most part to the, to the extreme

(54:34):
that we do it, um, almost every inch of the
planet has been affected in some way by human creativity. Like,
we love to make take something and make it into
something else. That's what we do. And, um, and we
love to take ideas and run with them. And so anyway,
I had this idea for a book that was, that
was going to be set in Brazil. It was a
novel and it was about it was going to be

(54:54):
about this woman in Minnesota who's very lonely, lives a
very private life. She's desperately in love with her married boss.
There's a huge project that he gets involved in, in
a multinational conglomerate down in the Amazon rainforest, and it
goes south. Uh, a person goes missing, a bunch of
money goes missing, and he sends her down. Uh, her boss,

(55:17):
who she's in love with, sends her down to, um,
investigate and find out what happens. And her whole ordered
peaceful life gets overturned and she has this huge adventure. And, um, anyway,
I was working on that book, and then personal things happened,
and I ended up writing the book. Committed instead, came
back to work on it and felt like it was
like the life was out of it. Couldn't kind of

(55:39):
get the energy field around it anymore. And around that
same time, I met the writer Ann Patchett at an event, and, um,
and we just instantly sparked and fell in love with
each other and and I after she spoke, she was
so electrifying. When she spoke, I went up to her
and I said, I just, I just love you. And
she grabbed me and kissed me on the lips, which

(55:59):
is not very Ann Patchett and said, and I love you,
Liz Gilbert. And we became pen pals and started exchanging stories.
And about a year after that, she started mentioning that
she was working on a new novel, and I asked
her what it was about, and she said it was
a novel set in the Amazon, and I told her
that I had also been working on a novel set
in the Amazon. That's all I said about it. I said,

(56:20):
I've also been working on it. I had been, but
it's dead now. It died. The life of it went out.
What's yours about? She said, I don't know, I'm still
formulating it, but I'll tell you about it later. And
in about a year after that, we met in Portland.
She was almost done with the book, and she I said,
tell me about your Amazon book. And she said, you
tell me first. And I said, well, it's about this woman,
and she's in love with her boss. She lives in Minnesota.

(56:41):
She's sent down to the Amazon to find a missing person,
and a bunch of money goes missing. And then chaos ensues.
And she looked at me and again, this is not
very Ann Patchett. And she said, you have got to
be fucking kidding me. And I said, what's your book about?
And she said, it's about a woman in Minnesota who's
a lonely spinster, desperately in love with her married boss
who works for a huge multinational corporation. And he gets

(57:03):
involved in a deal down in the Amazon. And it
goes wrong and a person goes missing and a bunch
of money goes missing, and they send her down to
find it. And that's Ann's novel, State of Wonder, um,
which is an incredible book that she wrote, and I didn't. And,
and it's like we were we were like, that's not
a genre, you know what I mean? That's not like

(57:24):
a vampire romance. That's not that is so incredibly specific
that these are the exactly the same idea. And we
kind of traced back, like, when did you lose the idea?
When did you find the idea? And our little magical
thinking is that it was exchanged in the kiss and
that the idea was like, whoop, I'm going to jump

(57:45):
into a novelist who's actually going to give me attention
on this because Anne was ready to do it. And ideas.
I think some of them will wait a long time
for you and others won't. Um, others will be like,
I don't think you're actually going to make me manifest,
so I'm going to go find somebody else. And sometimes
when I've got an idea and I'm, you know, I'm not,
I don't have the time to work on it. I'll

(58:05):
talk to it every day and say, just stay with me. Like,
don't go jump into Barbara Kingsolver's mind. Like, just stay,
stay with me, I will, I promise. Like next year
in March, I will begin working on you. You know, like,
I keep the I keep the connection alive with it. Um.
Don't go, you know, keep. I'm your. I'm your guy.

S2 (58:26):
Well, I think that's a beautiful note. Uh, the exchange
of the kiss between you and Ann Patchett. The exchange
of the embrace with anybody. I think it's a beautiful
note to leave it on. Elizabeth Gilbert, such a pleasure
talking to you here today. And, um, we wish you well.

S3 (58:44):
Thank you so much. And thanks for your thoughtful and
sensitive questions and I wish you well too.

S1 (58:50):
That was eat, pray, love author Elizabeth Gilbert in conversation
with journalist David Lazer on the latest Good Weekend talks.
If you enjoyed this episode, please remember to subscribe, rate
and comment wherever you get your podcasts and keep tuning
in for more compelling conversations coming soon. We talk to
Australian artist Ken Doane, who's 85 years old but still

(59:11):
going strong, in conversation with Sydney Morning Herald arts editor
Nick Galvin. Good Weekend Talks is brought to you by
the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Proud newsrooms powered
by subscriptions to support independent journalism. Search, subscribe Sydney Morning
Herald or The Age? This episode of Good Weekend Talks
is produced by Konrad Marshall and edited by Tim Mummery.

(59:32):
Our executive producer is Tammy Mills. Tom McKendrick is head
of audio. And Melissa Stevens is the editor of Good Weekend.