September 10, 2025 • 59 mins
There’s one thing you definitely know about Elizabeth Gilbert.
She wrote Eat Pray Love - a book that became a global phenomenon, a movie, and a blueprint for millions of women seeking transformation. It made Liz one of the most famous writers in the world.
But behind that fame was a deeper story - one Liz never told. Until now.
In her new memoir, All the Way to the River, Elizabeth Gilbert tells the truth about the love of her life, her best friend-turned-partner, the late Rayya Elias. It’s a story that’s fierce, complicated, and far from the romantic ideal many people projected onto them. It’s also about Liz’s own descent into addiction; not to drugs or alcohol, but to sex and love.
“I am a sex and love addict,” she writes. “I have caused tremendous harm to myself and others.” In this brutally honest conversation, Liz opens up to Holly about the darkest chapters of her life; the chaos of living with a partner relapsing into addiction, the shame of her own destructive patterns, and the moment she contemplated something unthinkable.
But this is also a story about healing, truth, and grace. About the kind of honesty that can save your life. And about what happens when you stop running, and finally let yourself be seen.
This is Elizabeth Gilbert like you’ve never heard her before: Unfiltered. Grieving. Funny. Fierce.
And ready to tell the whole truth.
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CREDITS:
Guest: Elizabeth Gilbert
Host: Holly Wainwright
Executive Producer: Naima Brown
Senior Producer: Bree Player
Audio Producer: Jacob Round
Video Producer: Josh Green
Recorded with Session in Progress studios.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
You're listening to a MoMA Mia podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Mamma Maya acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters
that this podcast is recorded on.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
I was prepared to be Ray's caregiver as she died
of cancer, but I wasn't prepared to be living with
like a ravenous, vampiric junkie. And it was horrifying, And
I mean it escalated to the point that I was
so desperate and so abused that I actually, like seriously
contemplated murdering her.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
There's one thing you definitely know about Elizabeth Gilbert. She
wrote Eat, Pray Love. That book, released almost twenty years
ago in two thousand and six, is one that became
a sensation, a moment, a movement. It sold more than
fifteen million copies worldwide, became a movie starring Julia Roberts,
(01:07):
and sent countless women off to India, in Italy and
Bali in search of their own version of enlightenment. And
it made Liz Gilbert one of those rare things, a
very very famous writer. Then, depending on how much you
loved Eat Prey, you might know a few more details
about what happened next. She married that guy from the
(01:27):
end of the book. She toured the world for a
few years with her best friend, a musician and filmmaker
called Raya Elias, promoting her best selling novels and Raya's
gritty memoir and talking about how to live a creative
life of integrity. Then Raya was diagnosed with terminal liver
cancer in twenty sixteen, and Elizabeth told the world that
(01:49):
they were in fact not only best friends, but in love.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
Her marriage ended.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
She and Raya held a commitment ceremony with their closest friends,
and Liz cared for her through her final months.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
Raya Elias died.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
In January twenty eighteen, and Liz Gilbert devastated. Grieving on creating,
she wrote a joyful novel from the depths.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
Of pain called City of Girls.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
She was prolific on social media for a time, posting
about grief and briefly talking about falling in love again
with an old friend, and then quiet, Liz Gilbert left
social media and slowly slowly she began to write a
new community for herself on substack, in a place she
caused letters from Love. Over the years since Raya's death,
(02:36):
she has spoken sparingly about how she lives and loves
now and the truth of what happened until now.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
Her new book, All the.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
Way to the River is a memoir about her and
Raya's great love story and what went before that, and
about her marriages, and about Gilbert's own life destroying addiction.
I am a sex and love addict, writes Gilbert. I
have caused tremendous harm to myself and others through my
decades of sex and love addiction. I have inserted myself
(03:08):
into other people's relationships, and I have broken up families.
I have lied to myself and others. I have hurt
people whom I promise to cherish. I have crossed boundaries
with friends. I have run away from people who cared
about me and toward people who didn't. I have cheated
on people and allowed myself to be cheated on.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
I have tried to.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
Buy love with money, she goes on. I have committed
and accepted shameful objectification. I have used people's bodies as drugs,
both sedatives and stimulants. I have treated my own body
with terrible disrespect, and I have never been able to stop.
That's what All the Way to the River is about.
(03:51):
Friends A recovering addicts rory telling of a story that
many thought they knew, and at its center is Raya.
Liz says, this is their story, her very best effort
to tell the truth of what happened between me and
Raya Elias, our friendship, our romance, our beauty, rage and pain.
But that story isn't what you think, friends, If you
(04:12):
think it's all flowers and sunsets and a calm fade
into a glorious eternal togetherness, no, not so much. Not
with all the drugs and the leaving, oh and the
murder plot all the way to the river is exceptional,
brutal and honest and brave. And I could barely contain
myself when I got the opportunity to talk to Liz
Gilbert about it. Here is Elizabeth Gilbert. Liz, I've already
(04:37):
told you how much how incredible this book is, but
I would love to start talking about it with a
quote from Raya that you use to explain part of
her singularity, where you say she said, when everything else
in the room has blown up or dissolved away, the
only thing left standing will be the truth. And this
book it drips with truth. It's like swollen with truth.
(05:01):
It's so true, and you say that it's your very
best effort to tell the truth about what happened between
you and Raya. Was there any part of you that
was afraid to blow up and dissolve so many preconceptions
and false idols, and you know, was there any part
of you that was scared of that when you were
(05:23):
writing this incredible book.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
Oh, thank you, thank you, and hello and hello for
having me in the show. And I love that we're
just going to dive right into the white hot, radioactive
center of the truth. Let's do it. That's a great
first question. Yes, And the short answer to that is, yes,
there were lots of parts of me that were afraid
(05:46):
of going, you know, right into the middle of it
and telling the entire story. And the reason that it
took me seven years after she died to write the
stories because of all sorts of reservations I had about
about telling this story, not least of which I mean,
I actually would say foremost of which was not so
(06:07):
much about like revealing myself to other people, which were
pretty comfortable doing, but like I didn't want to revisit it,
you know, like there are parts of that story that
are so harrowing and traumatizing, like I would have been
pretty happy just to put a coat of paint over
to pay over it, walked away, you know, and been like, yeah,
(06:30):
you know, we really loved each other. We were good friends.
You know, she died like that. I don't really want
to talk about it, Like I didn't really want to
talk about it. And the thing that I loved the
most about Raya Elias, and there was a lot to love,
was best encapsulated in a line about her that our friend,
the novelist Johnny Miles said at her funeral. He said,
(06:53):
she didn't want your false self. She wouldn't accept your
false self. She had this way of just looking at
you and looking right through all the stories and being like, dude,
what's actually going on here? And I felt like that
penetrating gaze, that fearlessness in the face of the truth
was her most noble legacy, And so eventually it was like, dude,
(07:18):
you just got to sit down and see what actually happened.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
It's actually in the book that trepidation. Yeah, there are
excerpts from your journals in here, there are illustrations, there
are all sorts of things, but there's also this wonderful
sense for the reader that when you're about to jump
into those very murky parts, you're like, Okay, I could
leave this there. I could leave this with the romantic
(07:41):
notion that you've all maybe walked away with or chosen
to believe. But actually, and there's actually a pardon it
where you say, Before I could write these next few chapters,
I had to take myself off to Central America for
a while. I mean, it must have been an enormous
you know, it must have been very difficult to do that.
But did you feel invested in letting this? You talk
(08:06):
a lot about Raya and also yourself and your relationship
and how maybe it had been put on a pedestal
by a lot of people that they believed a certain
version of it, and that comes through so strongly. But also,
like every relationship, the messy depths of it are exposed to.
(08:26):
Do you still write in that way to let other
people feel seen in their messiness?
Speaker 1 (08:34):
Oh? Yeah, you know, I think that's the highest public
service that we can possibly do. And I have grown
so much and my life has been so transformed by
people who are willing to learn in public or willing
to reveal themselves in public. Some of my greatest teachers
(08:57):
are people who I've never personally met, but their work
and the way that they forensically, you know, go into
the excavations of their own truth. The fearlessness about what
they're willing to reveal, has transformed me and made me
feel much less alone, much less crazy, much less lost.
(09:23):
And so for sure, I mean, and it's not just
that I want people to feel seen, But what I
really hope that I conveyed in this book is I
want people to feel innocent. And innocence is a really
difficult thing for a lot of us to feel, especially
having been raised if we've been raised in any culture
(09:46):
influenced by the West. I shouldn't just say that most
cultures are shame based. I've traveled. I've traveled around the world.
Shames of powerful cultural control mechanism that keeps families gritted together,
that keeps neighborhoods gritted together, that keeps more raised. And
you know, shames a power, powerful cultural tool, and most
(10:08):
of us have been deep impacted by it. And the
thought that we might be innocent and be a lot
for us to imagine. I think of innocence as kind
of the opposite of shame, and and I say it
multiple times in the book. I reiterate, like, there's an
innocence in all of this too, Like there's an innocence
(10:29):
in addiction, there's an innocence in codependency. There's an innocence
in denial. Oh my god, there's certainly an innocence in denial.
Denial is a precious tool of the psyche to guard
and protect you before you are ready to be capable
of seeing truthful things, and it's just doing its job
trying to help, you know. So, yeah, that's what I
(10:51):
That's what I hope. Listen, people will come away from
it with whatever they need to come away from it with.
That was a lot of prepositions to put in a
row there, but you know that. But I hope that
people see a shared humanity and a shared a shared
innocence in that all any of us are ever trying
to do is get through the day and by any
(11:15):
tools and mechanisms possible, and the only thing anyone literally
ever is doing is what they think is a good
idea at that moment, and that's innocent.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
In the story of your life with Raya and where
that love story went is also very much in an
hand in hand here with stories of addiction, and the
story is that, and you've talked about this publicly a
few times that in Ray's final weeks and months, she
(11:45):
sunk back into addiction. I don't know if that is
the right language, but the addiction reared its head again. Oh,
that's a good way to put its the way to
put it right. And those chapters are shocking, Liz, they
are very they are shocking to read and incredibly moving.
And then there's your addiction, your love and sex addiction
(12:08):
that puts a different lens on this whole experience too.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
You have a chapter in.
Speaker 3 (12:13):
There that's called public Private Secret that's based from a
Marquez quote. I think it's hard to imagine a bigger
gap between public Liz and real Liz than those final
months when your life in that New York City apartment
was so was so desperate. There was a moment where
(12:37):
you decided to call friends and it changed everything. Can
you tell us a bit about that?
Speaker 1 (12:43):
Yeah, And that line, Public Private Secret is Garcia America
has said that everybody has three lives, a public life,
a private life, and a secret life. And somebody asked
me one time, what's the difference between a private life
and a secret life. And you know, your private life
is the life that you don't share with the public.
That's your intimate life with your family and friends, or
(13:05):
when you're alone. Your secret life is what they don't
even know about, you know, and oftentimes what you don't
even know about, Like, you know, the complexities of the
human capacity for compartmentalization often mean that we hide parts
of ourselves, not only from others, but from us. You know,
(13:26):
sometimes I'm the last to know that I've been up
to something really unhealthy because I'm so good at doing
things behind my own back, holding my cards so close
to the chest, I can't even read them, you know.
It has been a common feature of my life. And
another friend of mine, when they read that part, said,
oh right. The reason people keep their secret life secret
(13:49):
is because if it were to come out, it would
destroy both your private life and your public life. And
that's what addiction is often is marked by, like, there's
things I'm doing that nobody must ever know about, or
it will destroy my private life and my public life.
And what was happening during that time was that Reya,
who had been in recovery from heroin and cocaine addiction.
(14:11):
She'd been a low bottom, as we call it in
the room, a low bottom junkie, like living, you know,
for a lot of her adult life, living on the streets,
living in jails and institutions, you know, a real desperate
heroin addict. And she was clean from that for a
really long time, and then at the end of her
(14:33):
cancer journey, she picked it back up again and went
back into just this harrowing level of cocaine and opioid addiction.
And it's so fast, you know, Like it really made
my head spin, because that was the one thing nobody
saw coming. Like I was prepared to be Ray's caregiver
(14:53):
as she died of cancer, but I wasn't prepared to
be living with like a ravenous, vampiric junkie. And I
had never known her as that person. And that's something
that I think anybody who's ever lived with an addict
can identify with, is the incredible disconnect between this person
that you know and the person that the addict becomes.
(15:15):
And it was horrifying, and I mean it escalated to
the point that I was so desperate and so abused
that I actually, like seriously contemplated murdering her, and I
write about it in the book really openly because I
think it's important to talk about the lengths, like how
far we can be pushed. And she was a hospice
(15:36):
patient and there was absolutely no way that I could
have an intervention and tell her that if you don't
stop doing drugs, you're going to die, because she was
already dying. It was a real, like karmic predicament that
I was in, and I'm like, she's killing me. She
now has to die. And as I say in the book,
I'm the nice lady who wrote in Pray Love, and
that's where I got to. That's where we can get
(15:58):
to when we follow that far away from ourselves. And
instead of murdering her, what I ended up doing that
day was beginning to tell the truth, calling a bunch
of friends and really letting myself be seen and revealing
what was actually going on in our apartment, because up
(16:20):
until that point i'd been communicating with the world through
what we're essentially a series of press releases. You know,
it was just even with my intimate friends, being like, yeah,
Ray is really brave, and you know she's struggling and
she's really brave, and she's amazing, and she's my hero,
and I'm you know, I'm a selfless caregiver and We've
got this whole thing under control. And nothing could have
(16:42):
been further from the truth. At that point, when she
was spending thousands of dollars a day a week on cocaine,
I was going down to the needle exchange to get
needles for her. It was a nightmare. Like it was.
It was. It was a nightmare, and nothing in my
life had ever prepared me for anything like that. But
I see now that that that moment of beginning to
(17:03):
let myself be seen, there's that's a hinge point in
my life that I would say was the beginning. I
wouldn't have known it that day, but the beginning of
my journey into my own twelve step recovery for extreme
codependency and enabling behaviors that have characterized all my relationships.
Speaker 3 (17:21):
Because one of those friends sort of said that to you,
didn't they in a way is that maybe you have
well you have the words obviously, but that you have
a part in this lires maybe you need help. And
what's so beautiful in the horror of this story is
of that part of the story. Obviously, the whole story
is certainly not not fooled with horror? Is that that's
(17:45):
what you begin to examine as you say, how does
the Eat Prey Love Lady get to that point?
Speaker 2 (17:50):
And that's what you're saying, this is how far I
will go.
Speaker 3 (17:54):
Can you explain a little bit about what you mean
about being a sex and love at it, because I
think probably some listeners to this show would think that
that's something that men say they are when they can't
stop cheating on their wives, like a sort of very mainstream.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
Sorry, yeah, diagnose this of it.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
Oh yeah, I definitely had heard of sex addiction, but
it's something that I associated with men and something that
I associated with like enacting out behavior around using prostitution,
around you know, going to massage parlor's addiction to pornography,
people who can't stop cheating on their partners. That's not
what my life looked like. So that's not something that
(18:34):
I would have thought that I was. But I identify
now as a sex and law addict in recovery, and
I when I identify myself, I'm qualifying myself for the
program that I belong to and I'm part of in
my recovery, I very much choose to use both of
those words sex and love, and I very much chose
(18:56):
to use both of those words in the book rather
than couching it in euphemism or hiding behind words that
women are more comfortable with, like codependency, you know, because
I really want to to shine a big fat light
on not just the fact that I'm a blackout codependent
and a skid row enabler, but also that my entire
(19:20):
since pubescent's life, have used sex as a way of
trying to get my needs met, mostly by men by
Raya when I was with Raya. But that's a currency
that I figured out at a pretty young age could
get me what we call in my recovery program lava, love, attention, validation,
(19:45):
and affection that without which I did not think I
could survive. And the evidence that I did not think
I could survive without that lava without that love, attention, validation,
and affection is you know, if you were to lay
out my entire like if you were to chart out
my entire sexual and romantic history starting from the age
(20:06):
of fourteen and going until the age of which I
did do as part of my recovery program. And if
you were to show that chart with all of its
details to somebody and say, give me a psychological profile
of this person, they would not say that is definitely
(20:26):
an emotionally stable and healthy human beings, like they would
like a twelve year old child would look at that
and be like bish ekra from that Coally's help, Like
whoever is doing that is not okay? Like this is
not okay going from one like overlapping, constantly overlapping from
one relationship to another. This is clearly somebody who has
a total inability to be alone. This is clearly somebody
(20:49):
who has a total inability to meet her own needs.
This is clearly somebody who's addicted to intensity and drama.
This is not a healthy portrait of a healthy human being.
And so that's why I claim the diagnosis sex and
mon addict. Even though for a woman to say that
(21:09):
publicly is rare. It doesn't mean that there aren't a
lot of women in the program that I go to.
It's just that there's I almost feel like it carries
the same burden of shame that alcoholism did one hundred
years ago. And the whole reason that those anonymous programs
became anonymous was because of the tremendous shame of being
(21:30):
an alcoholic. I don't think that really exists so much anymore.
I think drug addiction and alcoholic and a lot of
other addictions are they're much more out in the open,
But this one, especially for women, is still, yeah, a
tremendous amount of shame of not being able to handle
yourself sexually as a woman.
Speaker 3 (21:48):
I think that there are a lot of women who
listen to what you just said, and certainly when I
was reading the book some of the handover the mouth moments.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
You talk about.
Speaker 3 (21:57):
Using people in the way that our traditional view of
an addict uses drugs to mask to, you know, make
you feel less alone. As you've said, then it doesn't
work because, like any addiction, almost the tolerance changes, and
everybody inevitably lets you down. I mean they don't, but
(22:18):
in your mind lets you down doesn't fix everything, and
then the fury that comes.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
Up in you.
Speaker 3 (22:24):
You also write so brilliantly about even after this terrible
incident with ray or when you have to leave, and
then you're like, I couldn't fix it, and she doesn't
know how great I was, and there's a sort of
resentment always in why didn't they feel grateful for all
the things I did for them. I think they're going
to be a lot of women who are like, yes,
(22:47):
that's me.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
I myself into that guy.
Speaker 3 (22:50):
Yes, and then he turned around and he didn't fix
everything in my life, And fuck him, it's all.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Him, you know.
Speaker 3 (22:57):
I think a lot of women feel that, like we'll
recognize that and maybe not realize that this is them,
that this is their pattern.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
Well yeah, and as my first sponsor said to me,
once there's the prefix co is built right there into
the word codependent. It's right there. They put it right
there at the beginning so that you could see that
it involves two people, you know, like you are co
creating this dysfunction, like you know you And of course
(23:29):
I like a good codependent. I do love me an addict,
you know, like I do love me a lost cause
I love me a fixer up or I love somebody
who who who needs to be rescued so that I
can be secure. And a friend of mine describes it
as bad maths to put it in like just there's
(23:52):
this mathematical equation that I think men can do it too,
but women really do this a lot and I certainly
have done this a lot, which is like, I'm going
to take every single thing that I have and every
single thing that I am, and I'm going to pour
it into you. So I'm going to empty myself into you.
Like so that's the first part of the equation. I'm
(24:12):
going to empty my resources. I'm going to give you
all of my love. I'm going to hold nothing in reserve.
I'm going to give you all of my care. I'm
going to give you all of my tenderness, all of
my nurturing, every single thing. I'm going to boost you up.
I'm going to support you in every possible way. And
in return, you're going to give me a sense of
myself that I do not have. Right, You're going to
(24:33):
give me a sense of value and a sense of
my esteem and a sense of my worth that is
absolutely missing in me. That's your job, right Oftentimes, I mean,
like all drugs, it kind of works at first, right, Like,
nobody would do any of this if there wasn't a payoff, Right,
there's in it. Oftentimes, especially in the early days of romance,
there seems to be that payoff seems to be working
(24:55):
right when but when that person inevitably starts to recoil,
to recoil, and to retract themselves from this incredibly intense,
energetic exchange. What I then become is a beggar who
the way I picture it is, I'm now standing begging
(25:16):
outside of a pawn shop where all my belongings are, Like,
I gave you everything that I am, and I gave
you everything that I have, and now I'm going to
stand outside this closed pawnshop and beg you to give
me something back, right, And if you don't, then I
blame you for leaving me empty. But I'm the one
who emptied myself into you, right, but only always, like
(25:37):
only one percent of the time. And also I think
this is often a common thing with women. Every single
person who I ever thought would take care of me,
I ended up taking care of yes, And that's also
been like a prevalent theme in my relationships, Like wait
a minute, I was supposed to give you all of
this so that you would take care of me, But
here I am providing for your every need, you know.
(25:58):
And then comes to the resentment in the rage, Yes,
you know you took you took it from me. You
I gave you everything, you know, and I always my
joke is that that the anthem of the embittered codependent
is after all I've done for you, And I still
battle with that as an overgiver, blaming somebody for emptying me,
(26:22):
when in fact I did that, And that's my continuous work.
Speaker 3 (26:29):
We're about to take a small break, but in a
moment I'll be back with more from the Inimitable Liz Gilbert.
One of the complexities around this with women, as we
were just discussing when you were saying about the shame
that women can feel about using this label towards themselves,
is it, and you write in this book, is that
society upset expects women to give themselves to death almost
(26:51):
you know that is our role is to take care
of everybody else, and no wonder we're angry and exhausted.
As I know, I've heard you said before that every
woman you grew up around was angry and exhausted.
Speaker 2 (27:03):
Tell me a bit.
Speaker 3 (27:03):
About what life looks like in recovery from that, because
also in the book you talk about after Raya's death
you went on what you call a bender almost but
then you go back to the rooms of recovery, and
now for years you have lived in recovery from this.
What does that look like for you?
Speaker 1 (27:26):
Know?
Speaker 2 (27:26):
To explain on quite a basic level.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
Well I could. I can only share what it looks
like for me, because I don't want to speak for
any particular program or group of people. But I can
say what my recovery journey looks like. It was beautifully
explained to me at the beginning of my recovery journey.
That obsession is when you put something at the center
(27:49):
of your focus and you push away everything else, right,
and so that person or that substance or that behavior
becomes this sort of monumental energy devouring center of your
entire life, and all things are pushed away. So what
recovery looks like is you're reversing. For me, there's a
(28:13):
daily effort to reverse that that picture. So I and
so what was at the center of my life now
must go to the periphery. So and what was at
the periphery now must come to the center. So what
was at the center of my life was this non
stop pursuit of romantic and sexual attention, this non like,
(28:33):
this ferocious desperate need to couple, to be in union,
to be loved, to be seen, to be valued to
be chosen, you know this I mean, And that was
at the center of my existence long before I ever
even became sexually active as a very young teenager, like
I wanted that, long before I was figuring out how
to get it from boys and men. That was the
center of my life. That is now far in the periphery.
(28:57):
It's like this is going way out to the deep
and shallow end of the swimming pool, Like we're pushing
this very far away, and what we're putting in the
center of my life is everything that I neglected in
order to obsess over this fixation. And so that means, like,
you know, the way it was described to me when
I first came in was we call it top line behaviors,
(29:18):
you know, like the things that I can do for
myself that nourish and uplift my own existence, which does
two things. One is that nourishes and uplifts my own existence,
and the second is that it teaches me how to
resource within myself or within a community of a safe
community of friends, or within a relationship with a higher
(29:39):
power of some sort. It teaches me how to how
to resource within myself everything that I've always been demanding
that other people give to me, and so that's essentially
learning how to take care of myself. And you know,
we often say in the rooms of recovery, I was
raised in dysfunction, but I grew up in recovery, you know.
(29:59):
So my growing up has happened in the last seven years,
which is taking complete and absolute accountability for my own
life and recognizing that that is not anybody else's job,
nor ever should it have been, and that I am
capable of that, which is great news and a big
(30:19):
surprise to people.
Speaker 3 (30:22):
I've heard you say that you've never had a relationship
as great as not being in a relationship. People must
if for a recovery, and I know again you can
only speak for yourself. But in recovery from sex and
love addiction, does that bias definition mean you have to
be alone in a romantic sense.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
No, no, not at all. It just means you have
to be sane and that you have to be self providing.
You know that you have to be emotionally autonomous, whether
you are emotionally autonomous within a relationship or emotionally autonomous
not within a relationship. So the fundamental thing is learning
how to be in a good, very good relationship with yourself,
(31:07):
because that's that starved and vacant self relationship is the
thing that led to all of these incredibly dysfunctional behaviors
that caused me to harm myself and others. So for me,
what that has looked like over the last seven years
is a decision to stay away from romance and dating
(31:29):
at this point. For other people who are in recovery
from sex and love addiction, it can mean revitalizing an
existing marriage that they had created harm within, or something
called sober dating, which is learning how to interact romantically
with people in a sober way. And I have, as
(31:51):
part of my recovery, created a sober dating plan with
my sponsor and with a number of people in my
rooms who helped me to create it. And it's essentially
like best practices for Liz, you know, like and these
are the things that you know, if I were to
someday decide that are to put it more honestly, if
(32:12):
the higher power that I guide my life upon now
would someday suggest to me that it would be beneficial
to everyone, because that's also how I'm trying to guide
my life now, is like what would be beneficial to everyone? Me,
dating people is not necessarily beneficial to them. And I
don't say that in any kind of itself attacking way,
Like I really have come to love this being who
(32:35):
I am, But I'm not sure that anyone would recommend
partnering up with me, you know what I mean, Like,
like does anyone really want to be my fourth spouse?
Speaker 3 (32:46):
You know?
Speaker 1 (32:46):
Like does anybody like does anybody really want to tackle this?
Like I think it's a public service for me, honestly
to love people in a different way, and to love
people in a way where I can show up in
truly generous love, which I'm great at as a friend,
and I'm great at as a family member, and I'm
great at as a community member. But if that should change,
(33:08):
then and I've got this sober dating plan that includes
items like no two week long first dates, Like You're
not going to go on a date with somebody and
two weeks later they're living with you, Like We're not
doing that, you know, Like no opening bank accounts for
people like, no lavish gifts to try to seduce. No,
(33:29):
no going on big, glamorous romantic trips with someone I'm
who I've only known for a month because I've got
to stay in reality and make sure that, like anyone
can fall in love with someone on a tropical island,
we have to see whether this actually works in the
real world. And no constant texting between between dates, because
I can get sucked into that and lost in that,
and I have to go like, if I'm going to
(33:50):
go on a date, I have to come home afterwards
and I won't see you again for a week, because
I need to remember that I love my life. I
need to remember that I have friends, that I have
a dog, that I have a career, you know, all
these things that I throw away when I fall into
desperate obsession and fixation on somebody I've got hold on to.
So you know, that's a plan that's in place. But
(34:13):
I have not gotten a signal yet, either internally or
from what I call God, that it would be beneficial
for me to partner up with anybody right now. And
I also think that my enjoyment that I'm experiencing of
living a drama free life and living in a self
partnered way is such a delight that I don't really
(34:35):
want to give it up. And I feel it's also
an amends to my younger self, who never got the
opportunity to live alone and never got the opportunity to
learn how to adult because I was always enmeshed in
one person after another.
Speaker 3 (34:48):
And I've heard you say that you're the opposite of
lonely living alone, that you're so much less lonely than
you have been in many romantic relationships. I think that's
what a lot of women are afraid of, is that
who am I without all these people who need me?
But for you, it seems that life is beautiful.
Speaker 1 (35:10):
Yeah. The way I describe my life right now is
that it's blooming. And another description that I definition that
I love of addiction is addiction is giving up everything
for one thing, and recovery is giving up one thing
for everything. And my path over the last seven years
(35:32):
of giving up this lifetime fixation on partnership and co
mingling the lives is that everything else has gotten my
energy that didn't use to. I mean, I've written three
books in the last six years. That's insane. I've never
had such creative power as I have right now. And
(35:54):
the loneliest I have ever been in my entire life.
I can if I were to think of the top
three loneliest moments of my life. In each case there
was somebody else in the bed with me. Two can
be much lonelier than one. And I think a lot
of us know what I mean when I say that
the feeling of this incredible gap and distance and closeheartedness
(36:19):
between you and the person who you're with is such
an awful kind of loneliness. So I live alone, but
I I'm in engagement with my entire life in this
in this really vivid way. And again this is I
can't be clear enough. This is just my own experience,
and this is not like, it's not a prospect book is.
(36:42):
I hope that nothing in the book is prescriptive, and
I hope that nothing that I ever share is prescriptive.
I'm just telling what my life feels like right now.
And if somebody moved into my house right now would
feel like a home invasion. I'd be why are your
shoes here? Why are you like? Why are your things here?
Why are your things here? Like when my plants and
(37:04):
my books and my like my whole life is mine
for the first time and my body is Mike for
the first time, And that's something that has been in
a constantly unfolded joy.
Speaker 3 (37:17):
As well going back to the story of Raya in
the book. Now, you just took us through the nice, Eat, pray,
love lady plotting murder. After that period you move away,
you move away from Raya at that time, but you
come back together for her final weeks with another of
(37:40):
Raya's loved ones, And what you write about that is
so again, so truthful.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
I think anyone.
Speaker 3 (37:50):
Who's been with somebody who's dying and thought it was
going to be peaceful and gorgeous like in the movies,
and there's everything's gorgeous.
Speaker 2 (37:57):
You write with.
Speaker 3 (37:58):
Such truth, of course, but also little touches of humor.
Can you just tell me about the night that you
and and the other loved ones.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
Around thought that Raya was going to die?
Speaker 1 (38:13):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (38:13):
Can you tell me about Christmas night?
Speaker 1 (38:15):
Please? Yeah.
Speaker 3 (38:17):
So, I don't know if it's appropriate, but I actually
left out loud loud it's so.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
Good, Oh my God. And a hospice nurse one time
said to me, if you cannot laugh at death, you've
got to get out of show business because like, there
are so many I mean, you know this like like
ridiculous and embarrassing, and they are so like and so
is death at times. So at the end of Raya's life,
her ex wife Gigi, and her ex girlfriend Stacy and
(38:48):
I became her three caregivers. A lot of people who
are in queer relationships have told me like, oh, yeah,
that's the thing, you know, like that, that's like definitely
a lesbian thing, you know, like And and we we
came together as her primary as her prime primary caregivers,
her sister. There were other people who came in and out,
(39:08):
but we we like canceled our whole lives and moved
to Detroit to take care of her when she was dying.
And on Christmas night, I was sleeping with ray and
I woke up to give her meds at four o'clock
in the morning. And at this point she was you know,
the hospice people had said, like, she's very at any
time she could die, and her I could tell that
(39:32):
she was dying. Her lips were blue, her skin was cold,
she was non responsive. I couldn't wake her up, her
breathing was ragged, and it just was so clear that
this was the moment. And there was this kind of poignant,
devastating poetry to the fact that it was Christmas night
as well. And I went and got I woke up
(39:53):
Gigi and Stacy and I said, I think it was
about four am, and I said, I think it's I
think it's happening. I think she's dying. And we all
climbed into bed with her and wrapped our bodies around her,
and Gigi put on sacred music and Stacey lit a candle,
and then we just took turns talking to her, because
they say that hearing is the last thing that a
(40:15):
person loses as they're dying, and so we we just
told her how much we loved her and how much
she meant to us, and what a grand being she
was and how she had transformed us all. And then
it got really, really really quiet, just as the sun
was coming up, and we just all fell into this deep,
sacred silence, at which point Raya suddenly opened her eyes
(40:36):
and said, what the fuck are you guys doing? And
we were like, oh, nothing, and she's like why are she?
She had Stacy in our bed, babe, and I'm like,
they're not, and like they roll out of but you know,
like we we all moments that earlier had been just
like weeping these poignant, beautiful tears, and she's like, are
(41:00):
you pretty candles were just doing you blowing out the candles,
blowing out the candles, taking the music that the sacred
music off, you know. She's like, what, Like, you guys
are weird, Like what are you literally doing? We're like nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing,
definitely not waiting for you to die. And then she
said she sat up, turned the light on, lit a
(41:21):
cigarette and said what day is it today? And I
said it's it's December twenty sixth, and she said, cool,
I want to go hit that sixty percent off sale
at Lululemon. And that is what we did. God help us,
that is what we did. Like and people who have
been with people who are dying know this. It's like
you think you know. And I remember calling my mom
(41:41):
because my mom's a nurse, and I was like, this
is such a rollercoaster, you know, like we're saying our goodbyes,
and then now she's shopping for ath leisure wear at
a Christmas sale, like, what what's going on? And my
Mom's like, nobody knows. This is why death is sort
of the great one of the many reasons that death
is the great mystery and the great equalizer. It's like
(42:04):
nobody can tell you when she's going to die. This
is she's in a negotiation between herself and her own
death right now. And it could be weeks, it could
be hours, it could be you know. I mean, she
had bound she had come back to life so many
times in her life as a drug atticude flatlined multiple
times and had been reborn. She'd reinvented herself so many times.
(42:27):
I at the end was like, she might just not die, like.
Speaker 2 (42:31):
She might be unkillable.
Speaker 1 (42:33):
She just might be unkillable, Like she just might not
die of stage four pinker attic of liver cancer because
so far, like she's such a monster, she's such so
like made of titanium or something. I don't even know
what this person's constitution was. But yeah, that was one
of the That was one of the more like sort
(42:54):
of extraordinary comic moments we went through.
Speaker 3 (43:02):
We're going to take a Moment's bright kid, but in
a moment, I'll be back with mol from Liz Gilbert.
After Ray's death, you went straight back to work. You
write about the fact that two weeks after she was
gone you were back on stage. Is talking to people
You were immediately back wanting to make money, get build
(43:26):
new relationships, when you look at that period of time, now, well,
how do you.
Speaker 2 (43:32):
See it perfect?
Speaker 1 (43:34):
You know, like just perfect. It is what it absolutely
had to be. And me being who I am and
who I was, you know, resilience is like baked into
me as it's part of like my family code. You
just you know, I come from Scannavian dairy farmers, from
(43:55):
the dust bowl. It's like you work like you just work,
and you don't complain and you don't wallow. You just
get back at it. And that's all I ever saw,
you know, And that's all I knew to do. And
I also don't think it was such a bad idea
because I had been so depleted by being a caregiver
(44:18):
that there was a vitality that I regained by going
back out into the field that I'm good at, you know,
like I maybe wasn't as good a caregiver as I
thought I was going to be, but I'm a good
public speaker and I'm a good writer, and I have
this career that I love, and so being reminded that
(44:39):
that I'm not just you know, a bedside nurse or
shadowed widow. I also am this person in my own
right who has not taken care of her life at
all for the last eighteen months, and who also had
just spent a dump truck of money and needed to
make needed to make money. But the final reason that
(45:02):
I would say that it was perfect was because I
don't think there's a right or wrong way to grieve.
And grief is an experience of unbearable pain like that,
I mean, maybe not unbearable, because we bear it right
up there on the edge of unbearable and whatever you
(45:22):
have got to do to move through that is fine.
And people respond to grief in all sorts of different ways,
And there's a lot of judgment that we have of
one another about the way that people are grieving, like
they're not grieving right, you know, or they're in denial,
or they rebounded right back into another relationship, or you know,
(45:43):
there's there's this multitude of they're not allowing them to
alves to feel their feelings, they're feeling their feelings too much.
They're shutting down, you know, like they're frozen. Leave everyone alone,
you know, like leave everyone alone. Being human is very hard.
Being grief is the hardest part of being human. And
(46:03):
the thing I know about grief is that it's a
bill that has to be paid eventually. It's a bill
of tremendous, unbearable sorrow that has to be paid eventually.
You either pay it right away or it'll catch up
with you later and knock on your door and you'll
pay it later. And I paid my grief debt in
(46:24):
installments and then in some massive payments that came years later.
Speaker 3 (46:31):
The book begins with a visitation from Raya of sorts.
You say that my love was in the room, and
you're like, that's an amazing feat because she died six
years ago. Do you know what Raya thinks of this book?
Speaker 2 (46:45):
Do you care?
Speaker 1 (46:46):
I care what everyone thinks of this Listen, I'm the
one who the world's champion people.
Speaker 3 (46:51):
Please, mate, Well, it's wonderful, so you're fine. But also
I know you're doing a lot of work to get
away from that.
Speaker 1 (46:58):
I am getting a lot of work to get away
from that. I have to say, quite honestly, I don't know.
And I know that she wanted me to do it.
I know that she I know that she loved the truth.
I know that she wrote about her own darkness and
her own addiction very openly in her own memoir. Yes,
and in autobiographical films that she made and music that
(47:22):
she made. Her whole artistic expression sprung out of revealing her,
letting herself be seen in mind to be seen. But
ultimately there was a point in the writing of the
book where I had to maybe even go past the
level of truth that even Raya would have been comfortable with,
(47:43):
because there was this feeling of like, if you're going
to do this, and you're going to tell the story,
then you have got to tell the entire story, and
that includes not only excavating Ray's darkness but my own.
And I don't feel her as much anymore. I mean,
(48:03):
in the immediacy after her death, she was as vivid
and present to me as you are right now. I mean,
she was right here, and I have rare encounters now
with her spirit. And I think that part of the
sort of parceling out of grief is that you lose
the person and then you lose the feeling of them,
(48:25):
you know, like after that in my own theology, the
way that I perceived that what I think has happened
is that her spirit has moved on from me. I
don't know that it has moved on from everybody that
she loved, but one of the you know, she used
to promise. She promised me, I'm not going to leave
(48:46):
until both of us are ready, and I will won't
leave you until I know that you can stand on
your own two feet in every circumstance of your life.
That was a promise she made, and in fact, she died.
Her body died before I was ready and before I
knew how to stand on my own two feet, but
her spirit stuck around for those first few heroin years.
(49:08):
And now that I am standing on my own two
feet and taking care of my own life and knowing
how to be accountable, learning how to set boundaries, learning
how to say no, learning how to learning what's healthy
for me and what isn't healthy, all these things that
it's taken me so long to learn. It's as if
(49:29):
I feel her spirit backing off, like Okay, Liz is
good now and I can go into the mystery. That's
how I like to think of it.
Speaker 3 (49:41):
We started this conversation talking about truth, and as you
just said that, you do wonder if this book has
gone gone past a level of truth, of even that
you've been writing about your life, obviously in a very
public way. It's almost twenty years since Eat, Pray, Love
and that. But you talk about that very sudden fame
in the book, and you talk about this sudden responsibility
(50:01):
that apparently you've got to fix the world now and
you're the wisest person in it. You must have learned
an enormous amount about how to care about what everybody
thinks about this book, about your life, about your choices,
and how to be very true to that. What's your
relationship like now? With all you know for how this
(50:23):
is going to be received.
Speaker 1 (50:25):
I feel really relaxed about it. To me that the
difficult part of this book was the living of the story,
that the aftermath of the story, the incredibly hard work
that I've put into making addiction recovery this central focus
(50:47):
of my entire life, and learning how to take care
of myself, and then figuring out how to freaking write
this thing, you know, and how to tell this at
many times what felt like a kind of untellable story,
not even necessarily because of how harrowing it is, but
just like, how do you tell? How do you tell
the story? You know, like as a creator and with
(51:11):
its completion, that's it, My work is done, you know,
like and now I'm going to do a different kind
of work, going out into the world on a publicity
tour and a speaking to her about the book. But
that's an entirely different thing that's not nearly as emotionally
arduous for me as the work of creating this thing was.
(51:33):
So I feel kind of like, I'm good, you know.
I like this thing that I've made. I feel that
it's brought closure and this sort of end of a
karmic cycle between me and Rhea that answered a lot
of the questions I set out to answer writing it,
and it's an offering, you know. And I think having
(51:55):
written about myself so much, but also I think this
is my tenth book. It's like I know at this point.
Speaker 3 (52:01):
That look, I just make them what happens to them
when that wants.
Speaker 2 (52:09):
Yeah, they're out there.
Speaker 1 (52:10):
Whoever wants to be its friend can be its friend.
But it's not. I can't control that, and I don't
have to control that, and I don't have to manage that.
And people are allowed to have whatever feeling about it
that they have in the same way that I am
allowed to express myself in writing a book. People are
allowed to express what they think of me. You know
(52:32):
that's what it means to put yourself out there like that.
So yeah, I feel pretty chill about it.
Speaker 3 (52:38):
Can I just ask you about the book's title about
all the Way to the River, because that actually means
something a bit different than I thought it did. Can
you explain what on all the Way to the River
Friend is?
Speaker 1 (52:51):
Yeah, this is a sweet thing that y used to say.
She used to say that I was her all the
Way to the River friend, And she had this metaphor
of friendship that was based on the geographical map of
downtown New York City, so you kind of have to
know New York's geography a little bit to get it.
But the way she explained it was she said, you know,
in your life, you've got these like very peripheral friends,
(53:14):
professional contacts, people that you are completely superficial with. And
she called those her fifth avenue friends because they're kind
of like right in the middle of the city. And
then your fourth and third avenue friends are friends that
you get a little bit more intimacy with and a
little closer to, and you let them see a little
bit more of your real life. And then you keep
going and you've got your second, first, second, first avenue friends,
(53:37):
and those are the people who you allowed to get
to know you and you know, to share some truths
about your life, and maybe you've started businesses together, been
to each other's weddings. There's a deeper level of intimacy.
And she would say it's not untill you get to
your alphabet city friends, your avenue ABC and D friends
that you that you really get to real intimacy, like
(54:00):
these are the people who know you, like the people
who bailed you out of jail, who know about the addiction,
whose couch you slept on during the divorce, you call
in the middle of the night when you're having a
panic attack, like the people who really really know you.
But she said, there's if you're very lucky, there's one
more level, and that's all the way to the East River.
And if you're very lucky, you might have one friend
(54:22):
in your life who will go all the way to
the river with you. And that's the person you could
never be anything but completely authentic with, the person who
knows you better than anyone. And she always called me,
long before we were a romantic couple, she called me
her all the way to the River friend, and I
was so proud of that and not but but and
(54:44):
anybody who's ever tried to walk from Fifth Avenue to
the East River in New York City knows it's not
necessarily a very nice walks.
Speaker 2 (54:53):
In a very nice river, and the river's not a
very nice river.
Speaker 1 (54:56):
And and but that's also part of really knowing somebody
is that you, in the end, you see everything, and
they see everything. And I can say with real confidence
that rayat Elias and I knew each other.
Speaker 3 (55:10):
Liszt Do you think that if you had have painted
over some of the uglier, trickiest, smellier parts of the story,
how would life have gone? How would things be different?
Speaker 1 (55:22):
Oh? Gosh. You know, there's a line that I love
from the great ancient Indian text, the Bug of the Gita,
that says it's better to live your own destiny imperfectly
than to live a perfect imitation of somebody else's life.
And I go back to that quote again and again.
(55:43):
I genuinely would rather live my own truth imperfectly and
messily and publicly and vulnerably, then live some lackered version
of an imitation of what I was taught life is
supposed to look like. And I also know this. I
(56:04):
know that every single time in my life that I
have tried to live my life in a respectable manner,
meaning like from what I was taught respectability is the
closest I've ever And I don't say this lightly. I
say this quite sincesarily. The closest I've ever come to
suicide in my life have been the times when I
(56:25):
have tried the hardest to color within the lines basically,
you know, and to live my life in a way
that will be pleasing and inoffensive and respected by others.
It is only when I can kind of eviscerate myself
and excavate and go down in there and find the
(56:49):
whole truth that I get well. And that's one of
the really wild and beautiful paradoxes about the healing journey
is some of this stuff is like some of these
things about ourselves. It's like, this is the last thing
in the world I want to be true about me. Yeah,
you know, this is the last thing in the world
(57:10):
I would want to be is an addict. And the
last thing in the world I would want to be
is powerless. Who wants to be powerless? You know? Like
our whole culture is about striving for power and yet
when I let go and unclench those white knuckled fists
and let my shoulders drop and just say I am
(57:32):
an addict and I am powerless over my addiction, there's
this tremendous release. And in that release, I think that
all the walls come down, and I can know myself,
and I can let others know me, and I can
know them, and that's ultimately what I think I came
(57:54):
here to do.
Speaker 3 (57:58):
I hope that conversation does some justice to the brilliant,
beautiful and brutal complexity of all the Way to the River,
and to Liz Gilbert in general, because as I keep
telling anyone, he'll stand still long enough for me to
talk at them. There are two mind boggling strands to
this story. There's Raya and what happened in the final
months of this extraordinary life in this central relationship. And
(58:20):
then there's the astonishing bravery of Liz turning the lens
inwards and asking what was my part in all this?
Speaker 2 (58:28):
At different times in her life.
Speaker 3 (58:29):
Gilbert's personal writing has given us different gifts and granted
us different permissions. With Eat, Pray, Love, she gave a
generation of women the permission to go in search of
themselves we've committed. She gave us permission to want the
love we might have been convincing ourselves we were fine without,
And now with all the way to the river, Liz
is giving us permission to question why we've chained our
(58:50):
self worth up in that pursuit of love in the
first place.
Speaker 2 (58:54):
Maybe it's okay to just not.
Speaker 3 (58:57):
Links for where to buy the book are in the
show notes, as is a link to Lizi's substack led
Us from Love. Enormous Thanks to Liz Gilbert for talking
with me today and to the No Filter team for
letting me sit in the hosting seat. The executive producer
of No Filter is n IAmA Brown. The senior producer
is pre Player. Audio production is by Jacob Brown, Video
(59:17):
editing is by Josh Green, and I'm your sometime host
Holly wayIn Right.
Speaker 2 (59:21):
Thanks for listening.
You're listening to a MoMA Mia podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Mamma Maya acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters
that this podcast is recorded on.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
I was prepared to be Ray's caregiver as she died
of cancer, but I wasn't prepared to be living with
like a ravenous, vampiric junkie. And it was horrifying, And
I mean it escalated to the point that I was
so desperate and so abused that I actually, like seriously
contemplated murdering her.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
There's one thing you definitely know about Elizabeth Gilbert. She
wrote Eat, Pray Love. That book, released almost twenty years
ago in two thousand and six, is one that became
a sensation, a moment, a movement. It sold more than
fifteen million copies worldwide, became a movie starring Julia Roberts,
(01:07):
and sent countless women off to India, in Italy and
Bali in search of their own version of enlightenment. And
it made Liz Gilbert one of those rare things, a
very very famous writer. Then, depending on how much you
loved Eat Prey, you might know a few more details
about what happened next. She married that guy from the
(01:27):
end of the book. She toured the world for a
few years with her best friend, a musician and filmmaker
called Raya Elias, promoting her best selling novels and Raya's
gritty memoir and talking about how to live a creative
life of integrity. Then Raya was diagnosed with terminal liver
cancer in twenty sixteen, and Elizabeth told the world that
(01:49):
they were in fact not only best friends, but in love.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
Her marriage ended.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
She and Raya held a commitment ceremony with their closest friends,
and Liz cared for her through her final months.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
Raya Elias died.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
In January twenty eighteen, and Liz Gilbert devastated. Grieving on creating,
she wrote a joyful novel from the depths.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
Of pain called City of Girls.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
She was prolific on social media for a time, posting
about grief and briefly talking about falling in love again
with an old friend, and then quiet, Liz Gilbert left
social media and slowly slowly she began to write a
new community for herself on substack, in a place she
caused letters from Love. Over the years since Raya's death,
(02:36):
she has spoken sparingly about how she lives and loves
now and the truth of what happened until now.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
Her new book, All the.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
Way to the River is a memoir about her and
Raya's great love story and what went before that, and
about her marriages, and about Gilbert's own life destroying addiction.
I am a sex and love addict, writes Gilbert. I
have caused tremendous harm to myself and others through my
decades of sex and love addiction. I have inserted myself
(03:08):
into other people's relationships, and I have broken up families.
I have lied to myself and others. I have hurt
people whom I promise to cherish. I have crossed boundaries
with friends. I have run away from people who cared
about me and toward people who didn't. I have cheated
on people and allowed myself to be cheated on.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
I have tried to.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
Buy love with money, she goes on. I have committed
and accepted shameful objectification. I have used people's bodies as drugs,
both sedatives and stimulants. I have treated my own body
with terrible disrespect, and I have never been able to stop.
That's what All the Way to the River is about.
(03:51):
Friends A recovering addicts rory telling of a story that
many thought they knew, and at its center is Raya.
Liz says, this is their story, her very best effort
to tell the truth of what happened between me and
Raya Elias, our friendship, our romance, our beauty, rage and pain.
But that story isn't what you think, friends, If you
(04:12):
think it's all flowers and sunsets and a calm fade
into a glorious eternal togetherness, no, not so much. Not
with all the drugs and the leaving, oh and the
murder plot all the way to the river is exceptional,
brutal and honest and brave. And I could barely contain
myself when I got the opportunity to talk to Liz
Gilbert about it. Here is Elizabeth Gilbert. Liz, I've already
(04:37):
told you how much how incredible this book is, but
I would love to start talking about it with a
quote from Raya that you use to explain part of
her singularity, where you say she said, when everything else
in the room has blown up or dissolved away, the
only thing left standing will be the truth. And this
book it drips with truth. It's like swollen with truth.
(05:01):
It's so true, and you say that it's your very
best effort to tell the truth about what happened between
you and Raya. Was there any part of you that
was afraid to blow up and dissolve so many preconceptions
and false idols, and you know, was there any part
of you that was scared of that when you were
(05:23):
writing this incredible book.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
Oh, thank you, thank you, and hello and hello for
having me in the show. And I love that we're
just going to dive right into the white hot, radioactive
center of the truth. Let's do it. That's a great
first question. Yes, And the short answer to that is, yes,
there were lots of parts of me that were afraid
(05:46):
of going, you know, right into the middle of it
and telling the entire story. And the reason that it
took me seven years after she died to write the
stories because of all sorts of reservations I had about
about telling this story, not least of which I mean,
I actually would say foremost of which was not so
(06:07):
much about like revealing myself to other people, which were
pretty comfortable doing, but like I didn't want to revisit it,
you know, like there are parts of that story that
are so harrowing and traumatizing, like I would have been
pretty happy just to put a coat of paint over
to pay over it, walked away, you know, and been like, yeah,
(06:30):
you know, we really loved each other. We were good friends.
You know, she died like that. I don't really want
to talk about it, Like I didn't really want to
talk about it. And the thing that I loved the
most about Raya Elias, and there was a lot to love,
was best encapsulated in a line about her that our friend,
the novelist Johnny Miles said at her funeral. He said,
(06:53):
she didn't want your false self. She wouldn't accept your
false self. She had this way of just looking at
you and looking right through all the stories and being like, dude,
what's actually going on here? And I felt like that
penetrating gaze, that fearlessness in the face of the truth
was her most noble legacy, And so eventually it was like, dude,
(07:18):
you just got to sit down and see what actually happened.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
It's actually in the book that trepidation. Yeah, there are
excerpts from your journals in here, there are illustrations, there
are all sorts of things, but there's also this wonderful
sense for the reader that when you're about to jump
into those very murky parts, you're like, Okay, I could
leave this there. I could leave this with the romantic
(07:41):
notion that you've all maybe walked away with or chosen
to believe. But actually, and there's actually a pardon it
where you say, Before I could write these next few chapters,
I had to take myself off to Central America for
a while. I mean, it must have been an enormous
you know, it must have been very difficult to do that.
But did you feel invested in letting this? You talk
(08:06):
a lot about Raya and also yourself and your relationship
and how maybe it had been put on a pedestal
by a lot of people that they believed a certain
version of it, and that comes through so strongly. But also,
like every relationship, the messy depths of it are exposed to.
(08:26):
Do you still write in that way to let other
people feel seen in their messiness?
Speaker 1 (08:34):
Oh? Yeah, you know, I think that's the highest public
service that we can possibly do. And I have grown
so much and my life has been so transformed by
people who are willing to learn in public or willing
to reveal themselves in public. Some of my greatest teachers
(08:57):
are people who I've never personally met, but their work
and the way that they forensically, you know, go into
the excavations of their own truth. The fearlessness about what
they're willing to reveal, has transformed me and made me
feel much less alone, much less crazy, much less lost.
(09:23):
And so for sure, I mean, and it's not just
that I want people to feel seen, But what I
really hope that I conveyed in this book is I
want people to feel innocent. And innocence is a really
difficult thing for a lot of us to feel, especially
having been raised if we've been raised in any culture
(09:46):
influenced by the West. I shouldn't just say that most
cultures are shame based. I've traveled. I've traveled around the world.
Shames of powerful cultural control mechanism that keeps families gritted together,
that keeps neighborhoods gritted together, that keeps more raised. And
you know, shames a power, powerful cultural tool, and most
(10:08):
of us have been deep impacted by it. And the
thought that we might be innocent and be a lot
for us to imagine. I think of innocence as kind
of the opposite of shame, and and I say it
multiple times in the book. I reiterate, like, there's an
innocence in all of this too, Like there's an innocence
(10:29):
in addiction, there's an innocence in codependency. There's an innocence
in denial. Oh my god, there's certainly an innocence in denial.
Denial is a precious tool of the psyche to guard
and protect you before you are ready to be capable
of seeing truthful things, and it's just doing its job
trying to help, you know. So, yeah, that's what I
(10:51):
That's what I hope. Listen, people will come away from
it with whatever they need to come away from it with.
That was a lot of prepositions to put in a
row there, but you know that. But I hope that
people see a shared humanity and a shared a shared
innocence in that all any of us are ever trying
to do is get through the day and by any
(11:15):
tools and mechanisms possible, and the only thing anyone literally
ever is doing is what they think is a good
idea at that moment, and that's innocent.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
In the story of your life with Raya and where
that love story went is also very much in an
hand in hand here with stories of addiction, and the
story is that, and you've talked about this publicly a
few times that in Ray's final weeks and months, she
(11:45):
sunk back into addiction. I don't know if that is
the right language, but the addiction reared its head again. Oh,
that's a good way to put its the way to
put it right. And those chapters are shocking, Liz, they
are very they are shocking to read and incredibly moving.
And then there's your addiction, your love and sex addiction
(12:08):
that puts a different lens on this whole experience too.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
You have a chapter in.
Speaker 3 (12:13):
There that's called public Private Secret that's based from a
Marquez quote. I think it's hard to imagine a bigger
gap between public Liz and real Liz than those final
months when your life in that New York City apartment
was so was so desperate. There was a moment where
(12:37):
you decided to call friends and it changed everything. Can
you tell us a bit about that?
Speaker 1 (12:43):
Yeah, And that line, Public Private Secret is Garcia America
has said that everybody has three lives, a public life,
a private life, and a secret life. And somebody asked
me one time, what's the difference between a private life
and a secret life. And you know, your private life
is the life that you don't share with the public.
That's your intimate life with your family and friends, or
(13:05):
when you're alone. Your secret life is what they don't
even know about, you know, and oftentimes what you don't
even know about, Like, you know, the complexities of the
human capacity for compartmentalization often mean that we hide parts
of ourselves, not only from others, but from us. You know,
(13:26):
sometimes I'm the last to know that I've been up
to something really unhealthy because I'm so good at doing
things behind my own back, holding my cards so close
to the chest, I can't even read them, you know.
It has been a common feature of my life. And
another friend of mine, when they read that part, said,
oh right. The reason people keep their secret life secret
(13:49):
is because if it were to come out, it would
destroy both your private life and your public life. And
that's what addiction is often is marked by, like, there's
things I'm doing that nobody must ever know about, or
it will destroy my private life and my public life.
And what was happening during that time was that Reya,
who had been in recovery from heroin and cocaine addiction.
(14:11):
She'd been a low bottom, as we call it in
the room, a low bottom junkie, like living, you know,
for a lot of her adult life, living on the streets,
living in jails and institutions, you know, a real desperate
heroin addict. And she was clean from that for a
really long time, and then at the end of her
(14:33):
cancer journey, she picked it back up again and went
back into just this harrowing level of cocaine and opioid addiction.
And it's so fast, you know, Like it really made
my head spin, because that was the one thing nobody
saw coming. Like I was prepared to be Ray's caregiver
(14:53):
as she died of cancer, but I wasn't prepared to
be living with like a ravenous, vampiric junkie. And I
had never known her as that person. And that's something
that I think anybody who's ever lived with an addict
can identify with, is the incredible disconnect between this person
that you know and the person that the addict becomes.
(15:15):
And it was horrifying, and I mean it escalated to
the point that I was so desperate and so abused
that I actually, like seriously contemplated murdering her, and I
write about it in the book really openly because I
think it's important to talk about the lengths, like how
far we can be pushed. And she was a hospice
(15:36):
patient and there was absolutely no way that I could
have an intervention and tell her that if you don't
stop doing drugs, you're going to die, because she was
already dying. It was a real, like karmic predicament that
I was in, and I'm like, she's killing me. She
now has to die. And as I say in the book,
I'm the nice lady who wrote in Pray Love, and
that's where I got to. That's where we can get
(15:58):
to when we follow that far away from ourselves. And
instead of murdering her, what I ended up doing that
day was beginning to tell the truth, calling a bunch
of friends and really letting myself be seen and revealing
what was actually going on in our apartment, because up
(16:20):
until that point i'd been communicating with the world through
what we're essentially a series of press releases. You know,
it was just even with my intimate friends, being like, yeah,
Ray is really brave, and you know she's struggling and
she's really brave, and she's amazing, and she's my hero,
and I'm you know, I'm a selfless caregiver and We've
got this whole thing under control. And nothing could have
(16:42):
been further from the truth. At that point, when she
was spending thousands of dollars a day a week on cocaine,
I was going down to the needle exchange to get
needles for her. It was a nightmare. Like it was.
It was. It was a nightmare, and nothing in my
life had ever prepared me for anything like that. But
I see now that that that moment of beginning to
(17:03):
let myself be seen, there's that's a hinge point in
my life that I would say was the beginning. I
wouldn't have known it that day, but the beginning of
my journey into my own twelve step recovery for extreme
codependency and enabling behaviors that have characterized all my relationships.
Speaker 3 (17:21):
Because one of those friends sort of said that to you,
didn't they in a way is that maybe you have
well you have the words obviously, but that you have
a part in this lires maybe you need help. And
what's so beautiful in the horror of this story is
of that part of the story. Obviously, the whole story
is certainly not not fooled with horror? Is that that's
(17:45):
what you begin to examine as you say, how does
the Eat Prey Love Lady get to that point?
Speaker 2 (17:50):
And that's what you're saying, this is how far I
will go.
Speaker 3 (17:54):
Can you explain a little bit about what you mean
about being a sex and love at it, because I
think probably some listeners to this show would think that
that's something that men say they are when they can't
stop cheating on their wives, like a sort of very mainstream.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
Sorry, yeah, diagnose this of it.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
Oh yeah, I definitely had heard of sex addiction, but
it's something that I associated with men and something that
I associated with like enacting out behavior around using prostitution,
around you know, going to massage parlor's addiction to pornography,
people who can't stop cheating on their partners. That's not
what my life looked like. So that's not something that
(18:34):
I would have thought that I was. But I identify
now as a sex and law addict in recovery, and
I when I identify myself, I'm qualifying myself for the
program that I belong to and I'm part of in
my recovery, I very much choose to use both of
those words sex and love, and I very much chose
(18:56):
to use both of those words in the book rather
than couching it in euphemism or hiding behind words that
women are more comfortable with, like codependency, you know, because
I really want to to shine a big fat light
on not just the fact that I'm a blackout codependent
and a skid row enabler, but also that my entire
(19:20):
since pubescent's life, have used sex as a way of
trying to get my needs met, mostly by men by
Raya when I was with Raya. But that's a currency
that I figured out at a pretty young age could
get me what we call in my recovery program lava, love, attention, validation,
(19:45):
and affection that without which I did not think I
could survive. And the evidence that I did not think
I could survive without that lava without that love, attention, validation,
and affection is you know, if you were to lay
out my entire like if you were to chart out
my entire sexual and romantic history starting from the age
(20:06):
of fourteen and going until the age of which I
did do as part of my recovery program. And if
you were to show that chart with all of its
details to somebody and say, give me a psychological profile
of this person, they would not say that is definitely
(20:26):
an emotionally stable and healthy human beings, like they would
like a twelve year old child would look at that
and be like bish ekra from that Coally's help, Like
whoever is doing that is not okay? Like this is
not okay going from one like overlapping, constantly overlapping from
one relationship to another. This is clearly somebody who has
a total inability to be alone. This is clearly somebody
(20:49):
who has a total inability to meet her own needs.
This is clearly somebody who's addicted to intensity and drama.
This is not a healthy portrait of a healthy human being.
And so that's why I claim the diagnosis sex and
mon addict. Even though for a woman to say that
(21:09):
publicly is rare. It doesn't mean that there aren't a
lot of women in the program that I go to.
It's just that there's I almost feel like it carries
the same burden of shame that alcoholism did one hundred
years ago. And the whole reason that those anonymous programs
became anonymous was because of the tremendous shame of being
(21:30):
an alcoholic. I don't think that really exists so much anymore.
I think drug addiction and alcoholic and a lot of
other addictions are they're much more out in the open,
But this one, especially for women, is still, yeah, a
tremendous amount of shame of not being able to handle
yourself sexually as a woman.
Speaker 3 (21:48):
I think that there are a lot of women who
listen to what you just said, and certainly when I
was reading the book some of the handover the mouth moments.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
You talk about.
Speaker 3 (21:57):
Using people in the way that our traditional view of
an addict uses drugs to mask to, you know, make
you feel less alone. As you've said, then it doesn't
work because, like any addiction, almost the tolerance changes, and
everybody inevitably lets you down. I mean they don't, but
(22:18):
in your mind lets you down doesn't fix everything, and
then the fury that comes.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
Up in you.
Speaker 3 (22:24):
You also write so brilliantly about even after this terrible
incident with ray or when you have to leave, and
then you're like, I couldn't fix it, and she doesn't
know how great I was, and there's a sort of
resentment always in why didn't they feel grateful for all
the things I did for them. I think they're going
to be a lot of women who are like, yes,
(22:47):
that's me.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
I myself into that guy.
Speaker 3 (22:50):
Yes, and then he turned around and he didn't fix
everything in my life, And fuck him, it's all.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Him, you know.
Speaker 3 (22:57):
I think a lot of women feel that, like we'll
recognize that and maybe not realize that this is them,
that this is their pattern.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
Well yeah, and as my first sponsor said to me,
once there's the prefix co is built right there into
the word codependent. It's right there. They put it right
there at the beginning so that you could see that
it involves two people, you know, like you are co
creating this dysfunction, like you know you And of course
(23:29):
I like a good codependent. I do love me an addict,
you know, like I do love me a lost cause
I love me a fixer up or I love somebody
who who who needs to be rescued so that I
can be secure. And a friend of mine describes it
as bad maths to put it in like just there's
(23:52):
this mathematical equation that I think men can do it too,
but women really do this a lot and I certainly
have done this a lot, which is like, I'm going
to take every single thing that I have and every
single thing that I am, and I'm going to pour
it into you. So I'm going to empty myself into you.
Like so that's the first part of the equation. I'm
(24:12):
going to empty my resources. I'm going to give you
all of my love. I'm going to hold nothing in reserve.
I'm going to give you all of my care. I'm
going to give you all of my tenderness, all of
my nurturing, every single thing. I'm going to boost you up.
I'm going to support you in every possible way. And
in return, you're going to give me a sense of
myself that I do not have. Right, You're going to
(24:33):
give me a sense of value and a sense of
my esteem and a sense of my worth that is
absolutely missing in me. That's your job, right Oftentimes, I mean,
like all drugs, it kind of works at first, right, Like,
nobody would do any of this if there wasn't a payoff, Right,
there's in it. Oftentimes, especially in the early days of romance,
there seems to be that payoff seems to be working
(24:55):
right when but when that person inevitably starts to recoil,
to recoil, and to retract themselves from this incredibly intense,
energetic exchange. What I then become is a beggar who
the way I picture it is, I'm now standing begging
(25:16):
outside of a pawn shop where all my belongings are, Like,
I gave you everything that I am, and I gave
you everything that I have, and now I'm going to
stand outside this closed pawnshop and beg you to give
me something back, right, And if you don't, then I
blame you for leaving me empty. But I'm the one
who emptied myself into you, right, but only always, like
(25:37):
only one percent of the time. And also I think
this is often a common thing with women. Every single
person who I ever thought would take care of me,
I ended up taking care of yes, And that's also
been like a prevalent theme in my relationships, Like wait
a minute, I was supposed to give you all of
this so that you would take care of me, But
here I am providing for your every need, you know.
(25:58):
And then comes to the resentment in the rage, Yes,
you know you took you took it from me. You
I gave you everything, you know, and I always my
joke is that that the anthem of the embittered codependent
is after all I've done for you, And I still
battle with that as an overgiver, blaming somebody for emptying me,
(26:22):
when in fact I did that, And that's my continuous work.
Speaker 3 (26:29):
We're about to take a small break, but in a
moment I'll be back with more from the Inimitable Liz Gilbert.
One of the complexities around this with women, as we
were just discussing when you were saying about the shame
that women can feel about using this label towards themselves,
is it, and you write in this book, is that
society upset expects women to give themselves to death almost
(26:51):
you know that is our role is to take care
of everybody else, and no wonder we're angry and exhausted.
As I know, I've heard you said before that every
woman you grew up around was angry and exhausted.
Speaker 2 (27:03):
Tell me a bit.
Speaker 3 (27:03):
About what life looks like in recovery from that, because
also in the book you talk about after Raya's death
you went on what you call a bender almost but
then you go back to the rooms of recovery, and
now for years you have lived in recovery from this.
What does that look like for you?
Speaker 1 (27:26):
Know?
Speaker 2 (27:26):
To explain on quite a basic level.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
Well I could. I can only share what it looks
like for me, because I don't want to speak for
any particular program or group of people. But I can
say what my recovery journey looks like. It was beautifully
explained to me at the beginning of my recovery journey.
That obsession is when you put something at the center
(27:49):
of your focus and you push away everything else, right,
and so that person or that substance or that behavior
becomes this sort of monumental energy devouring center of your
entire life, and all things are pushed away. So what
recovery looks like is you're reversing. For me, there's a
(28:13):
daily effort to reverse that that picture. So I and
so what was at the center of my life now
must go to the periphery. So and what was at
the periphery now must come to the center. So what
was at the center of my life was this non
stop pursuit of romantic and sexual attention, this non like,
(28:33):
this ferocious desperate need to couple, to be in union,
to be loved, to be seen, to be valued to
be chosen, you know this I mean, And that was
at the center of my existence long before I ever
even became sexually active as a very young teenager, like
I wanted that, long before I was figuring out how
to get it from boys and men. That was the
center of my life. That is now far in the periphery.
(28:57):
It's like this is going way out to the deep
and shallow end of the swimming pool, Like we're pushing
this very far away, and what we're putting in the
center of my life is everything that I neglected in
order to obsess over this fixation. And so that means, like,
you know, the way it was described to me when
I first came in was we call it top line behaviors,
(29:18):
you know, like the things that I can do for
myself that nourish and uplift my own existence, which does
two things. One is that nourishes and uplifts my own existence,
and the second is that it teaches me how to
resource within myself or within a community of a safe
community of friends, or within a relationship with a higher
(29:39):
power of some sort. It teaches me how to how
to resource within myself everything that I've always been demanding
that other people give to me, and so that's essentially
learning how to take care of myself. And you know,
we often say in the rooms of recovery, I was
raised in dysfunction, but I grew up in recovery, you know.
(29:59):
So my growing up has happened in the last seven years,
which is taking complete and absolute accountability for my own
life and recognizing that that is not anybody else's job,
nor ever should it have been, and that I am
capable of that, which is great news and a big
(30:19):
surprise to people.
Speaker 3 (30:22):
I've heard you say that you've never had a relationship
as great as not being in a relationship. People must
if for a recovery, and I know again you can
only speak for yourself. But in recovery from sex and
love addiction, does that bias definition mean you have to
be alone in a romantic sense.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
No, no, not at all. It just means you have
to be sane and that you have to be self providing.
You know that you have to be emotionally autonomous, whether
you are emotionally autonomous within a relationship or emotionally autonomous
not within a relationship. So the fundamental thing is learning
how to be in a good, very good relationship with yourself,
(31:07):
because that's that starved and vacant self relationship is the
thing that led to all of these incredibly dysfunctional behaviors
that caused me to harm myself and others. So for me,
what that has looked like over the last seven years
is a decision to stay away from romance and dating
(31:29):
at this point. For other people who are in recovery
from sex and love addiction, it can mean revitalizing an
existing marriage that they had created harm within, or something
called sober dating, which is learning how to interact romantically
with people in a sober way. And I have, as
(31:51):
part of my recovery, created a sober dating plan with
my sponsor and with a number of people in my
rooms who helped me to create it. And it's essentially
like best practices for Liz, you know, like and these
are the things that you know, if I were to
someday decide that are to put it more honestly, if
(32:12):
the higher power that I guide my life upon now
would someday suggest to me that it would be beneficial
to everyone, because that's also how I'm trying to guide
my life now, is like what would be beneficial to everyone? Me,
dating people is not necessarily beneficial to them. And I
don't say that in any kind of itself attacking way,
Like I really have come to love this being who
(32:35):
I am, But I'm not sure that anyone would recommend
partnering up with me, you know what I mean, Like,
like does anyone really want to be my fourth spouse?
Speaker 3 (32:46):
You know?
Speaker 1 (32:46):
Like does anybody like does anybody really want to tackle this?
Like I think it's a public service for me, honestly
to love people in a different way, and to love
people in a way where I can show up in
truly generous love, which I'm great at as a friend,
and I'm great at as a family member, and I'm
great at as a community member. But if that should change,
(33:08):
then and I've got this sober dating plan that includes
items like no two week long first dates, Like You're
not going to go on a date with somebody and
two weeks later they're living with you, Like We're not
doing that, you know, Like no opening bank accounts for
people like, no lavish gifts to try to seduce. No,
(33:29):
no going on big, glamorous romantic trips with someone I'm
who I've only known for a month because I've got
to stay in reality and make sure that, like anyone
can fall in love with someone on a tropical island,
we have to see whether this actually works in the
real world. And no constant texting between between dates, because
I can get sucked into that and lost in that,
and I have to go like, if I'm going to
(33:50):
go on a date, I have to come home afterwards
and I won't see you again for a week, because
I need to remember that I love my life. I
need to remember that I have friends, that I have
a dog, that I have a career, you know, all
these things that I throw away when I fall into
desperate obsession and fixation on somebody I've got hold on to.
So you know, that's a plan that's in place. But
(34:13):
I have not gotten a signal yet, either internally or
from what I call God, that it would be beneficial
for me to partner up with anybody right now. And
I also think that my enjoyment that I'm experiencing of
living a drama free life and living in a self
partnered way is such a delight that I don't really
(34:35):
want to give it up. And I feel it's also
an amends to my younger self, who never got the
opportunity to live alone and never got the opportunity to
learn how to adult because I was always enmeshed in
one person after another.
Speaker 3 (34:48):
And I've heard you say that you're the opposite of
lonely living alone, that you're so much less lonely than
you have been in many romantic relationships. I think that's
what a lot of women are afraid of, is that
who am I without all these people who need me?
But for you, it seems that life is beautiful.
Speaker 1 (35:10):
Yeah. The way I describe my life right now is
that it's blooming. And another description that I definition that
I love of addiction is addiction is giving up everything
for one thing, and recovery is giving up one thing
for everything. And my path over the last seven years
(35:32):
of giving up this lifetime fixation on partnership and co
mingling the lives is that everything else has gotten my
energy that didn't use to. I mean, I've written three
books in the last six years. That's insane. I've never
had such creative power as I have right now. And
(35:54):
the loneliest I have ever been in my entire life.
I can if I were to think of the top
three loneliest moments of my life. In each case there
was somebody else in the bed with me. Two can
be much lonelier than one. And I think a lot
of us know what I mean when I say that
the feeling of this incredible gap and distance and closeheartedness
(36:19):
between you and the person who you're with is such
an awful kind of loneliness. So I live alone, but
I I'm in engagement with my entire life in this
in this really vivid way. And again this is I
can't be clear enough. This is just my own experience,
and this is not like, it's not a prospect book is.
(36:42):
I hope that nothing in the book is prescriptive, and
I hope that nothing that I ever share is prescriptive.
I'm just telling what my life feels like right now.
And if somebody moved into my house right now would
feel like a home invasion. I'd be why are your
shoes here? Why are you like? Why are your things here?
Why are your things here? Like when my plants and
(37:04):
my books and my like my whole life is mine
for the first time and my body is Mike for
the first time, And that's something that has been in
a constantly unfolded joy.
Speaker 3 (37:17):
As well going back to the story of Raya in
the book. Now, you just took us through the nice, Eat, pray,
love lady plotting murder. After that period you move away,
you move away from Raya at that time, but you
come back together for her final weeks with another of
(37:40):
Raya's loved ones, And what you write about that is
so again, so truthful.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
I think anyone.
Speaker 3 (37:50):
Who's been with somebody who's dying and thought it was
going to be peaceful and gorgeous like in the movies,
and there's everything's gorgeous.
Speaker 2 (37:57):
You write with.
Speaker 3 (37:58):
Such truth, of course, but also little touches of humor.
Can you just tell me about the night that you
and and the other loved ones.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
Around thought that Raya was going to die?
Speaker 1 (38:13):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (38:13):
Can you tell me about Christmas night?
Speaker 1 (38:15):
Please? Yeah.
Speaker 3 (38:17):
So, I don't know if it's appropriate, but I actually
left out loud loud it's so.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
Good, Oh my God. And a hospice nurse one time
said to me, if you cannot laugh at death, you've
got to get out of show business because like, there
are so many I mean, you know this like like
ridiculous and embarrassing, and they are so like and so
is death at times. So at the end of Raya's life,
her ex wife Gigi, and her ex girlfriend Stacy and
(38:48):
I became her three caregivers. A lot of people who
are in queer relationships have told me like, oh, yeah,
that's the thing, you know, like that, that's like definitely
a lesbian thing, you know, like And and we we
came together as her primary as her prime primary caregivers,
her sister. There were other people who came in and out,
(39:08):
but we we like canceled our whole lives and moved
to Detroit to take care of her when she was dying.
And on Christmas night, I was sleeping with ray and
I woke up to give her meds at four o'clock
in the morning. And at this point she was you know,
the hospice people had said, like, she's very at any
time she could die, and her I could tell that
(39:32):
she was dying. Her lips were blue, her skin was cold,
she was non responsive. I couldn't wake her up, her
breathing was ragged, and it just was so clear that
this was the moment. And there was this kind of poignant,
devastating poetry to the fact that it was Christmas night
as well. And I went and got I woke up
(39:53):
Gigi and Stacy and I said, I think it was
about four am, and I said, I think it's I
think it's happening. I think she's dying. And we all
climbed into bed with her and wrapped our bodies around her,
and Gigi put on sacred music and Stacey lit a candle,
and then we just took turns talking to her, because
they say that hearing is the last thing that a
(40:15):
person loses as they're dying, and so we we just
told her how much we loved her and how much
she meant to us, and what a grand being she
was and how she had transformed us all. And then
it got really, really really quiet, just as the sun
was coming up, and we just all fell into this deep,
sacred silence, at which point Raya suddenly opened her eyes
(40:36):
and said, what the fuck are you guys doing? And
we were like, oh, nothing, and she's like why are she?
She had Stacy in our bed, babe, and I'm like,
they're not, and like they roll out of but you know,
like we we all moments that earlier had been just
like weeping these poignant, beautiful tears, and she's like, are
(41:00):
you pretty candles were just doing you blowing out the candles,
blowing out the candles, taking the music that the sacred
music off, you know. She's like, what, Like, you guys
are weird, Like what are you literally doing? We're like nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing,
definitely not waiting for you to die. And then she
said she sat up, turned the light on, lit a
(41:21):
cigarette and said what day is it today? And I
said it's it's December twenty sixth, and she said, cool,
I want to go hit that sixty percent off sale
at Lululemon. And that is what we did. God help us,
that is what we did. Like and people who have
been with people who are dying know this. It's like
you think you know. And I remember calling my mom
(41:41):
because my mom's a nurse, and I was like, this
is such a rollercoaster, you know, like we're saying our goodbyes,
and then now she's shopping for ath leisure wear at
a Christmas sale, like, what what's going on? And my
Mom's like, nobody knows. This is why death is sort
of the great one of the many reasons that death
is the great mystery and the great equalizer. It's like
(42:04):
nobody can tell you when she's going to die. This
is she's in a negotiation between herself and her own
death right now. And it could be weeks, it could
be hours, it could be you know. I mean, she
had bound she had come back to life so many
times in her life as a drug atticude flatlined multiple
times and had been reborn. She'd reinvented herself so many times.
(42:27):
I at the end was like, she might just not die, like.
Speaker 2 (42:31):
She might be unkillable.
Speaker 1 (42:33):
She just might be unkillable, Like she just might not
die of stage four pinker attic of liver cancer because
so far, like she's such a monster, she's such so
like made of titanium or something. I don't even know
what this person's constitution was. But yeah, that was one
of the That was one of the more like sort
(42:54):
of extraordinary comic moments we went through.
Speaker 3 (43:02):
We're going to take a Moment's bright kid, but in
a moment, I'll be back with mol from Liz Gilbert.
After Ray's death, you went straight back to work. You
write about the fact that two weeks after she was
gone you were back on stage. Is talking to people
You were immediately back wanting to make money, get build
(43:26):
new relationships, when you look at that period of time, now, well,
how do you.
Speaker 2 (43:32):
See it perfect?
Speaker 1 (43:34):
You know, like just perfect. It is what it absolutely
had to be. And me being who I am and
who I was, you know, resilience is like baked into
me as it's part of like my family code. You
just you know, I come from Scannavian dairy farmers, from
(43:55):
the dust bowl. It's like you work like you just work,
and you don't complain and you don't wallow. You just
get back at it. And that's all I ever saw,
you know, And that's all I knew to do. And
I also don't think it was such a bad idea
because I had been so depleted by being a caregiver
(44:18):
that there was a vitality that I regained by going
back out into the field that I'm good at, you know,
like I maybe wasn't as good a caregiver as I
thought I was going to be, but I'm a good
public speaker and I'm a good writer, and I have
this career that I love, and so being reminded that
(44:39):
that I'm not just you know, a bedside nurse or
shadowed widow. I also am this person in my own
right who has not taken care of her life at
all for the last eighteen months, and who also had
just spent a dump truck of money and needed to
make needed to make money. But the final reason that
(45:02):
I would say that it was perfect was because I
don't think there's a right or wrong way to grieve.
And grief is an experience of unbearable pain like that,
I mean, maybe not unbearable, because we bear it right
up there on the edge of unbearable and whatever you
(45:22):
have got to do to move through that is fine.
And people respond to grief in all sorts of different ways,
And there's a lot of judgment that we have of
one another about the way that people are grieving, like
they're not grieving right, you know, or they're in denial,
or they rebounded right back into another relationship, or you know,
(45:43):
there's there's this multitude of they're not allowing them to
alves to feel their feelings, they're feeling their feelings too much.
They're shutting down, you know, like they're frozen. Leave everyone alone,
you know, like leave everyone alone. Being human is very hard.
Being grief is the hardest part of being human. And
(46:03):
the thing I know about grief is that it's a
bill that has to be paid eventually. It's a bill
of tremendous, unbearable sorrow that has to be paid eventually.
You either pay it right away or it'll catch up
with you later and knock on your door and you'll
pay it later. And I paid my grief debt in
(46:24):
installments and then in some massive payments that came years later.
Speaker 3 (46:31):
The book begins with a visitation from Raya of sorts.
You say that my love was in the room, and
you're like, that's an amazing feat because she died six
years ago. Do you know what Raya thinks of this book?
Speaker 2 (46:45):
Do you care?
Speaker 1 (46:46):
I care what everyone thinks of this Listen, I'm the
one who the world's champion people.
Speaker 3 (46:51):
Please, mate, Well, it's wonderful, so you're fine. But also
I know you're doing a lot of work to get
away from that.
Speaker 1 (46:58):
I am getting a lot of work to get away
from that. I have to say, quite honestly, I don't know.
And I know that she wanted me to do it.
I know that she I know that she loved the truth.
I know that she wrote about her own darkness and
her own addiction very openly in her own memoir. Yes,
and in autobiographical films that she made and music that
(47:22):
she made. Her whole artistic expression sprung out of revealing her,
letting herself be seen in mind to be seen. But
ultimately there was a point in the writing of the
book where I had to maybe even go past the
level of truth that even Raya would have been comfortable with,
(47:43):
because there was this feeling of like, if you're going
to do this, and you're going to tell the story,
then you have got to tell the entire story, and
that includes not only excavating Ray's darkness but my own.
And I don't feel her as much anymore. I mean,
(48:03):
in the immediacy after her death, she was as vivid
and present to me as you are right now. I mean,
she was right here, and I have rare encounters now
with her spirit. And I think that part of the
sort of parceling out of grief is that you lose
the person and then you lose the feeling of them,
(48:25):
you know, like after that in my own theology, the
way that I perceived that what I think has happened
is that her spirit has moved on from me. I
don't know that it has moved on from everybody that
she loved, but one of the you know, she used
to promise. She promised me, I'm not going to leave
(48:46):
until both of us are ready, and I will won't
leave you until I know that you can stand on
your own two feet in every circumstance of your life.
That was a promise she made, and in fact, she died.
Her body died before I was ready and before I
knew how to stand on my own two feet, but
her spirit stuck around for those first few heroin years.
(49:08):
And now that I am standing on my own two
feet and taking care of my own life and knowing
how to be accountable, learning how to set boundaries, learning
how to say no, learning how to learning what's healthy
for me and what isn't healthy, all these things that
it's taken me so long to learn. It's as if
(49:29):
I feel her spirit backing off, like Okay, Liz is
good now and I can go into the mystery. That's
how I like to think of it.
Speaker 3 (49:41):
We started this conversation talking about truth, and as you
just said that, you do wonder if this book has
gone gone past a level of truth, of even that
you've been writing about your life, obviously in a very
public way. It's almost twenty years since Eat, Pray, Love
and that. But you talk about that very sudden fame
in the book, and you talk about this sudden responsibility
(50:01):
that apparently you've got to fix the world now and
you're the wisest person in it. You must have learned
an enormous amount about how to care about what everybody
thinks about this book, about your life, about your choices,
and how to be very true to that. What's your
relationship like now? With all you know for how this
(50:23):
is going to be received.
Speaker 1 (50:25):
I feel really relaxed about it. To me that the
difficult part of this book was the living of the story,
that the aftermath of the story, the incredibly hard work
that I've put into making addiction recovery this central focus
(50:47):
of my entire life, and learning how to take care
of myself, and then figuring out how to freaking write
this thing, you know, and how to tell this at
many times what felt like a kind of untellable story,
not even necessarily because of how harrowing it is, but
just like, how do you tell? How do you tell
the story? You know, like as a creator and with
(51:11):
its completion, that's it, My work is done, you know,
like and now I'm going to do a different kind
of work, going out into the world on a publicity
tour and a speaking to her about the book. But
that's an entirely different thing that's not nearly as emotionally
arduous for me as the work of creating this thing was.
(51:33):
So I feel kind of like, I'm good, you know.
I like this thing that I've made. I feel that
it's brought closure and this sort of end of a
karmic cycle between me and Rhea that answered a lot
of the questions I set out to answer writing it,
and it's an offering, you know. And I think having
(51:55):
written about myself so much, but also I think this
is my tenth book. It's like I know at this point.
Speaker 3 (52:01):
That look, I just make them what happens to them
when that wants.
Speaker 2 (52:09):
Yeah, they're out there.
Speaker 1 (52:10):
Whoever wants to be its friend can be its friend.
But it's not. I can't control that, and I don't
have to control that, and I don't have to manage that.
And people are allowed to have whatever feeling about it
that they have in the same way that I am
allowed to express myself in writing a book. People are
allowed to express what they think of me. You know
(52:32):
that's what it means to put yourself out there like that.
So yeah, I feel pretty chill about it.
Speaker 3 (52:38):
Can I just ask you about the book's title about
all the Way to the River, because that actually means
something a bit different than I thought it did. Can
you explain what on all the Way to the River
Friend is?
Speaker 1 (52:51):
Yeah, this is a sweet thing that y used to say.
She used to say that I was her all the
Way to the River friend, And she had this metaphor
of friendship that was based on the geographical map of
downtown New York City, so you kind of have to
know New York's geography a little bit to get it.
But the way she explained it was she said, you know,
in your life, you've got these like very peripheral friends,
(53:14):
professional contacts, people that you are completely superficial with. And
she called those her fifth avenue friends because they're kind
of like right in the middle of the city. And
then your fourth and third avenue friends are friends that
you get a little bit more intimacy with and a
little closer to, and you let them see a little
bit more of your real life. And then you keep
going and you've got your second, first, second, first avenue friends,
(53:37):
and those are the people who you allowed to get
to know you and you know, to share some truths
about your life, and maybe you've started businesses together, been
to each other's weddings. There's a deeper level of intimacy.
And she would say it's not untill you get to
your alphabet city friends, your avenue ABC and D friends
that you that you really get to real intimacy, like
(54:00):
these are the people who know you, like the people
who bailed you out of jail, who know about the addiction,
whose couch you slept on during the divorce, you call
in the middle of the night when you're having a
panic attack, like the people who really really know you.
But she said, there's if you're very lucky, there's one
more level, and that's all the way to the East River.
And if you're very lucky, you might have one friend
(54:22):
in your life who will go all the way to
the river with you. And that's the person you could
never be anything but completely authentic with, the person who
knows you better than anyone. And she always called me,
long before we were a romantic couple, she called me
her all the way to the River friend, and I
was so proud of that and not but but and
(54:44):
anybody who's ever tried to walk from Fifth Avenue to
the East River in New York City knows it's not
necessarily a very nice walks.
Speaker 2 (54:53):
In a very nice river, and the river's not a
very nice river.
Speaker 1 (54:56):
And and but that's also part of really knowing somebody
is that you, in the end, you see everything, and
they see everything. And I can say with real confidence
that rayat Elias and I knew each other.
Speaker 3 (55:10):
Liszt Do you think that if you had have painted
over some of the uglier, trickiest, smellier parts of the story,
how would life have gone? How would things be different?
Speaker 1 (55:22):
Oh? Gosh. You know, there's a line that I love
from the great ancient Indian text, the Bug of the Gita,
that says it's better to live your own destiny imperfectly
than to live a perfect imitation of somebody else's life.
And I go back to that quote again and again.
(55:43):
I genuinely would rather live my own truth imperfectly and
messily and publicly and vulnerably, then live some lackered version
of an imitation of what I was taught life is
supposed to look like. And I also know this. I
(56:04):
know that every single time in my life that I
have tried to live my life in a respectable manner,
meaning like from what I was taught respectability is the
closest I've ever And I don't say this lightly. I
say this quite sincesarily. The closest I've ever come to
suicide in my life have been the times when I
(56:25):
have tried the hardest to color within the lines basically,
you know, and to live my life in a way
that will be pleasing and inoffensive and respected by others.
It is only when I can kind of eviscerate myself
and excavate and go down in there and find the
(56:49):
whole truth that I get well. And that's one of
the really wild and beautiful paradoxes about the healing journey
is some of this stuff is like some of these
things about ourselves. It's like, this is the last thing
in the world I want to be true about me. Yeah,
you know, this is the last thing in the world
(57:10):
I would want to be is an addict. And the
last thing in the world I would want to be
is powerless. Who wants to be powerless? You know? Like
our whole culture is about striving for power and yet
when I let go and unclench those white knuckled fists
and let my shoulders drop and just say I am
(57:32):
an addict and I am powerless over my addiction, there's
this tremendous release. And in that release, I think that
all the walls come down, and I can know myself,
and I can let others know me, and I can
know them, and that's ultimately what I think I came
(57:54):
here to do.
Speaker 3 (57:58):
I hope that conversation does some justice to the brilliant,
beautiful and brutal complexity of all the Way to the River,
and to Liz Gilbert in general, because as I keep
telling anyone, he'll stand still long enough for me to
talk at them. There are two mind boggling strands to
this story. There's Raya and what happened in the final
months of this extraordinary life in this central relationship. And
(58:20):
then there's the astonishing bravery of Liz turning the lens
inwards and asking what was my part in all this?
Speaker 2 (58:28):
At different times in her life.
Speaker 3 (58:29):
Gilbert's personal writing has given us different gifts and granted
us different permissions. With Eat, Pray, Love, she gave a
generation of women the permission to go in search of
themselves we've committed. She gave us permission to want the
love we might have been convincing ourselves we were fine without,
And now with all the way to the river, Liz
is giving us permission to question why we've chained our
(58:50):
self worth up in that pursuit of love in the
first place.
Speaker 2 (58:54):
Maybe it's okay to just not.
Speaker 3 (58:57):
Links for where to buy the book are in the
show notes, as is a link to Lizi's substack led
Us from Love. Enormous Thanks to Liz Gilbert for talking
with me today and to the No Filter team for
letting me sit in the hosting seat. The executive producer
of No Filter is n IAmA Brown. The senior producer
is pre Player. Audio production is by Jacob Brown, Video
(59:17):
editing is by Josh Green, and I'm your sometime host
Holly wayIn Right.
Speaker 2 (59:21):
Thanks for listening.
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