In the wake of her 2006 memoir Eat Pray Love, the American author Elizabeth Gilbert has cemented her position as an inspiration throughout the world. Written in the wake of her divorce, her quest of self-discovery through Italy, India and Bali sold more than 15 million copies, was turned into a Hollywood movie starring Julia Roberts, and transformed Gilbert into something of a guru herself. Since then, she has published a memoir about marriage, Committed (2010), two well received novels and Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear (2015), a manifesto encouraging everyone to unleash their creativity. Her new memoir is hotly anticipated, not least by her two million online followers.
Essentially, the latest offering elaborates on the evolution of Gilbert’s relationship with her friend-turned-lover, Rayya Elias, and the tragic consequences of Rayya receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis. This is also, however, a memoir of addiction: Rayya is a drug addict, and Gilbert realises that she herself is a sex and love addict. The catastrophic collision of the two is narrated by Gilbert with an unflinching disregard for the preservation of her own reputation.
This honesty is refreshing, if disarmed somewhat by Gilbert’s warm, jocular tone that reminds the reader she is writing from a remove, having emerged from the darkness, once again, into light. The usual effervescence of Gilbert’s prose, a trademark of her literary sensibilities, has been sacrificed here somewhat in exchange for a chatty vernacular that is more akin to a friendly blog post, interspersed with some rather earnest poetry.
It is fascinating, however, to read Gilbert’s revelations concerning her life during “the flush and shiny post-Eat Pray Love years”, when her hard-won spiritual practices and enlightenment had been “replaced by constant overachieving and non-stop hustle for approval”: the grim reality of what happens after the happy ending. The corruption of her life by her extreme wealth and privilege makes for very uncomfortable reading, but Gilbert is nothing if not self-aware throughout.
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Gilbert says she was motivated to write this memoir as an antidote to the shame women in particular feel about sex and love addiction. There is a prevailing sense that Gilbert hopes that anyone whose lives have been touched by addiction, either their own or someone else’s, may find courage, resonance and empathy in hearing her own experiences of self-destruction and bearing witness to another’s.
Gilbert writes that she would like you to love and admire her, for this to be the most inspiring book of the year, “a tale of two courageous and amazing souls who face down death with a sense of creativity and wild adventure” but, instead, she has chosen to surrender and write the truth. With Gilbert’s charm, and devoted following, the end result may nonetheless be the same.
