All the Way to the River, by Elizabeth Gilbert

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My experience as a reader and, I guess, fan of Elizabeth Gilbert goes all the way back to Eat, Pray, Love, which I read and loved in the very early days of this blog. (She had already published a collection of short stories, a novel, and a non-fiction book before EPL catapulted her into celebrity, because like most overnight successes, she’d been working for awhile to get there. I haven’t read any of those).

I followed her through her exploration of marriage as an institution and her own second marriage in Committed. I adored her novel The Signature of All Things, thought Big Magic had some good things to say about creativity even if the woo-woo was a little much for me. I thought her novel City of Girls was good-but-not-great (understandable after reading her latest book and knowing the conditions under which she wrote City of Girls).

But now her new memoir is out, and the question is … can I follow Liz All the Way to the River?

This book has gotten a lot of attention, a lot of praise from Gilbert’s biggest fans, a huge amount of backlash, and some very bad reviews along with some good ones. It’s the story of Gilbert’s relationship with Rayya Elias, who was initially her hairdresser and then her best friend for many years, including the entire time while Gilbert was married to her Eat, Pray, Love/Committed husband. When Rayya discovered she had terminal cancer and only six months to live, Gilbert suddenly realized that this obsessively close friendship was actually both romantic and sexual (something she had been working hard to deny to herself for several years).

She left her husband, declared undying love to Rayya, and moved in to the house Rayya was living in, a house Gilbert owned and had been keeping her in rent-free for years. Gilbert’s plan was to spend the last months of Rayya’s life taking care of her true love and walking with her “all the way to the river” (the river is DEATH). This plan went a little off the rails when Rayya, a recovering heroin and cocaine addict who had been slowly relapsing with alcohol throughout their friendship, careened into full-blown addiction again in the last months of her life — and those months went on much longer than the six months Gilbert thought she had signed on for. Things got ugly, and everything fell apart, to the point where Gilbert seriously considered murdering her abusive, addictive, dying girlfriend — not to put Rayya out of her misery, but to release Gilbert from the misery of being with her.

It’s quite the journey, and it’s told in Gilbert’s trademark style: with some raw honesty, some great prose, some snark, and a more-than-healthy dose of uncritical woo-woo. The woo begins right at the start of the book with a much-too-long scene in which Gilbert is visited by Rayya’s spirit several years after her death, and “Rayya” gives Liz permission to write this book. I’m always mind-boggled when anyone interprets messages from the dead in such an unsuspicious, naive way, but particularly when the beloved dead person is sending you messages that are so perfectly aligned with what you obviously want to hear. Did Liz Gilbert ever, at any point, think “The voice of Rayya that I think I’m hearing is maybe just my own brain taking on her voice and telling me to go ahead with the book project”???

Apparently not.

Gilbert, who takes an eclectic path to spirituality (hence her time in the ashram in India in Eat, Pray, Love, which followed several years of studying mediation with a guru), also talks to God. A lot. And God talks back — though God’s voice, like Rayya’s, sounds suspiciously close to Gilbert’s own voice, or at least what you’d think she’d like to imagine God saying. The interspersed short chapters where Gilbert records her conversations with God are the worst writing in the book: twee, cloying, and cringe-worthy. I’m sorry, maybe for someone else they were enlightening and inspiring. I also talk to God, and sometimes think maybe I’m getting answers, but I can’t imagine putting these conversations in a book for other people to read. Whenever anyone poetically writes what they think the voice of God is saying to them, I just want to turn the page, or in this case skip ahead in the audiobook till I get to the next chapter of the actual story, which is what I did.

The story itself is compelling and well told: a love story, a story of passion and obsession, a story about codependency and love addiction, a story about an addict relapsing, a story about grief, a story about confronting the darkest side of your own nature when your life spins out of control. Gilbert brings Rayya vividly to life on the page, though, for me at least, the larger-that-life, vivacious, ruthlessly honest woman she depicts sounds like a rude, self-absorbed nightmare of a person — and that was before she started using drugs again. But attraction is famously subjective, and while I didn’t find Rayya’s character appealing at all, she was vividly drawn, and it was very easy to believe that Gilbert was head-over-heels in love with her.

Gilbert is also ruthlessly honest about her own mistakes: she sincerely believes she is a sex and love addict, and that her grand passion for Rayya was all about fulfilling her own needs, and this led her to do terrible things, including enabling Rayya’s slide back into active addiction and, oh yeah, almost murdering her. Gilbert is not celebrating any of this, or treating it lightly. She acknowledges that she screwed up, in dark and terrible ways, because this is what addiction does to people — as every memoir by an addict will tell you.

The story continues beyond the rock-bottom moment where Liz plans to murder Rayya (but doesn’t): Gilbert gets her shit together just enough to tell Rayya she can’t go on living like this; Rayya goes to stay with an ex-girlfriend who takes her in only on the condition she gets clean and ruthlessly manages her withdrawal and her medical care; Liz comes to stay, reconciles with sober Rayya, and soon after Rayya dies and Liz confronts the rest of her life. If you strip out the conversations with God and dead people, and ruthlessly edit down the chapters at the end when Gilbert gets into twelve-step programs in order to stop careening from one relationship to another, and if you entirely leave out the cringeworthy chapter about Gilbert learning to care for “Lizzie,” her inner child … then you’d be left with one hell of a memoir, which is what this book should be.

Unfortunately, because of the book marketing machine and to some extent the Elizabeth Gilbert Machine, it can’t be just a hell of a memoir. It has to also be a self-help book (memo to the world: memoirs don’t have to be self-help books! Writers, you can just tell us what happened to you, without telling us what we’re supposed to learn from it — we can decide that ourselves!). Gilbert has to address herself to all the codependents and sex/love addicts and anyone who’s been pulled into someone else’s addiction or used an addiction of their own to deal with their trauma and loneliness — spreading the net as wide as possible to convince everyone that they have Something To Learn from this book, rather than just reading a compelling story and taking our own thoughts and conclusions away from it.

I can’t buy into binary thinking on this one: this isn’t either a good book or a bad book. It’s a really good memoir wrapped up in the pink cotton-candy cloud of a terrible self-help/spiritual-guidance book. I want to read the gritty, painful story of bestselling author Liz Gilbert smashing up her life on the rocks of Rayya Elias, and a little glimmer of hope at the end to tell me she made it out alive and learned something. Cut the rest.

Has she learned something? I appreciated Gilbert’s honesty in admitting that the place of inner peace she reaches by the end of this book is very similar to the place she reached at the end of Eat, Pray, Love. One day at a time, and all that. Who knows where she’ll be in another 20 years, but I hope not still stuck in the same cycle all over again.

Recognizing her own fallibility and tendency to repeat destructive patterns, should Gilbert have written yet another book that will be hailed by some of her fans as a guideline for living better? Maybe, maybe not. Should she have written (and should she profit from) a book that exploits not just her own pain and darkest moments, but the pain and darkest moments of someone she loved? Is the book exploitative? At least one member of Rayya Elias’s family has gone on the record (though unnamed) to say she thinks it is, but others are OK with it (including Dead Rayya, if you believe Gilbert’s visions).

You can read it and decide, if you like addiction memoirs in which people do terrible things under the grip of their addiction, or grief memoirs that are honest about the messiness of seeing someone all the way to the river. Or you can not read it, and that would be OK too. You can even read it and linger thoughtfully over Liz’s conversations with God … though I, personally, still recommend skipping those.

Skipshock, by Caroline O’Donoghue

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Having read and loved Caroline O’Donoghue’s novel The Rachel Incident (which you can also hear me going on about on my podcast), I decided to give her fantasy novel a go. Skipshock is categorized as YA fantasy, but apart from the two main characters being in their late teens, there’s nothing that for me really distinguished it from fantasy written for adult readers: the worldbuilding is as complex and the stakes as high as in any adult fantasy.

Skipshock is a world-crossing fantasy novel (fantasy, but with what I’d consider some sci-fi elements also) in which Margo, a young Irish girl on a train on her way to boarding school suddenly gets jolted into a parallel world in which she is also riding on a train and meets Moon, a young travelling salesman. Moon lives in a universe of interconnected worlds where some people are able to travel from world to world, but the means of travel is strictly controlled by those in the richer and more comfortable worlds. Margot falls in with a group of freedom fighters who are trying to win back the right to travel freely between worlds and believe that her ability to cross from a previously unknown world might offer a key to opening the routes between worlds once again.

This was an engrossing novel in which, as I got near the end, I started to get that uneasy feeling that there was no way the story could be wrapped up in the remaining pages. And sure enough, it turns out Skipshock, just recently released, is “the first in a planned duology” so I will have to wait a year or more to find out what happens to Margo and Moon. But I think it will be worth the wait.

The Impossible Fortune, by Richard Osman

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This fifth installment in the beloved Thursday Murder Club series is a worthy addition to the collection. In fact, I found this more fun to read as the mystery was a little less convoluted than it has been in some of the past books. There’s still lots of emphasis on character and setting as much as on plot, which is one of the delights of this series for me. This book is the first one released after the original book in the series was made into a Netflix movie, and there’s a sly joke inserted here as a nod to people who complained about a specific casting choice in the movie, along with lots of other gentle humour. I really enjoyed this book.

Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs

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This was a book I picked up for research purposes and I didn’t actually read all of it, only the chapters relevant to what I was writing about, but it’s a very interesting piece of historical writing (intended more for the scholar than the general reader, but not entirely inaccessible to general readers). Essentially, it’s about how the roles of white and Black women in colonial Virginia became more clearly defined as English settlement and African slavery there became more entrenched, and how it was in the interest of the white male men who ruled the colony — those “anxious” patriarchs” to define white and Black versions of feminine experience almost in opposition to each other, so that neither could be an effective threat to the power of white, Christian, English men.

Weyward, by Emilia Hart

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Weyward is a triple-timeline novel about three women in the same family line with a heritage of nature magic/witchcraft in their DNA. Seventeenth-century Altha is on trial for witchcraft; Violet, a teenager at the beginning of WW2, is hemmed in by her father’s narrow expectations of what a woman’s life can be; twenty-first century Kate is fleeing an abusive marriage. While these women don’t know their history or the power of their family connection, each finds refuge in the same location — a cottage on the outskirts of an English village — and learns to use her power and break free of the restrictions that bind her. A nice feminist fantasy: I found Violet’s story the most powerful and affecting of the three.

The Paris Express

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A very short, almost terse, “bottle episode” of a novel, Emma Donoghue’s latest book imagines the hours leading up to one of the most famous train disasters in early rail history (famous because of the photograph of it, not because of a huge death toll or anything). Peopling her train cars with a mix of real historical figures who are known to have been on that train, real historical figures who weren’t but plausibly might have been, and a few wholly fictional characters, Donoghue brings this tiny slice of space and time to life with her trademark vivid style.

The Homemade God, by Rachel Joyce

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In The Homemade God, four adult siblings have to confront their relationships with their elderly father, who raised them as a single parent in a fairly chaotic household, and with one another. The triggering event is that Aging Dad, who is an artist of minimal talent but a fair degree of wealth and fame, has suddenly fallen in love with a woman who is younger than any of his children and who none of them have met. When he marries her, takes her away to the family villa in Italy, and shortly thereafter dies under mysterious circumstances, his family, naturally worried, converges on the villa to try to understand what happened. Along the way, all of them end up confronting not just their father’s widow but themselves and the ways in which their father, the “homemade god” of the title, has cast such a long shadow over all their lives. The ending of this book really moved me, which is a pretty high tribute from me.

Grown Ups, by Marian Keyes

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I recently realized I had never read anything by Marian Keyes even though she ticks a lot of my “favourite writer” boxes (Irish, writes sad/funny/hopeful novels about women and families, was hilarious on a podcast I listened to recently) so I picked up Grown Ups and it was a great place to start with her body of work. The novel traces a few months in the lives of the extended Casey family, who are a network of dysfunctions, lies, and secrets — all of which of course come spilling out in an unguarded moment, leading to both hilarity and heartbreak.

I really enjoyed this book and have moved on to other Marian Keyes books which no doubt you will be hearing about in due course.

Three Days in June, by Anne Tyler

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Three Days in June provides us with a classic and satisfying Anne Tyler setup. A middle-aged divorced woman, Gail, has to survive the weekend of her daughter’s wedding while navigating a sudden job loss, her own social awkwardness, her relationship with her daughter, and, most significantly, the unexpected necessity to spend the weekend under the same roof as her ex-husband Max, who has arrived expecting to crash at Gail’s place and also bringing a rescue cat in need of a foster home. (Gail does not want a cat, nor does she want Max). As the weekend with its tensions unfolds, so does the backstory of Gail’s life and her marriage to Max, leading to a conclusion that feels (to me, anyway) unforeseen but also just right.

Permanent Astonishment: A Memoir, by Tomson Highway

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I’m not sure what to say about this book. It’s brilliantly written, a wonderful story of Indigenous childhood and joy in rural Manitoba in the 1960s that plays with languages in a wonderful way and was a delight to listen to as an audiobook. And yet, it took me ages to get through the audiobook — while it was enjoyable listening, I never found it compelling.

Also as a settler-descended Canadian, it was odd to listen to a book by an acclaimed Indigenous author in which he writes about his years in residential school in a mostly positive way. It’s not that Highway is unaware of or unaffected by the harms done in the residential school system, but he chooses to focus on the way in which it opened doors to him for further education and his future career, and most of the stories he tells about his school days are funny or heartwarming ones about his fellow students.

This is an unexpected perspective, but obviously any Indigenous person has the right to tell their own story in whatever way works for them, and as the title implies, Tomson Highway, while acknowledging the hardships and discrimination forced upon Indigenous people in Canada, chooses to frame this particular book around Indigenous joy — “permanent astonishment” at the beauty of the land, the joy and resilience of the Cree, Dene, and Metis people he grew up among, and the liveliness and power of the Cree language.