Sex, Drugs and a Murder Plot — Elizabeth Gilbert’s New Memoir (Exclusive)

It took seven years for Elizabeth Gilbert to write about the events surrounding the death of her partner, Rayya Elias, in 2018. Her new memoir, All the Way to the River (out Sept. 9 from Riverhead Books), is a delicious mashup of narrative that’s by turns harrowing and healing; prayers and poems that serve as road markers along the way; and Gilbert’s own sketches, to give readers a moment to stop, breathe and take a break from the intensity.

For years, Gilbert tried to write about her and Rayya. But it wasn’t until she received what she calls a “visitation” from her late partner on her 54th birthday that she was able to really knuckle down and write the story with the level of truth it needed. 

“She was like, ‘Bitch, write that book,’ ” Gilbert says, of the woman whom she loved for “sailing her ship straight into the teeth of the gale of the truth.” 

Gilbert called that visitation from Rayya “the impetus and the permission that I needed” to, as she writes in the book, “go full punk rock with it.” And boy, does she ever. Gilbert pulls no punches, not even on herself, and that’s an intentional choice — one she now feels “really buoyant and joyful” about, especially if it can help someone who finds themselves at their own lowest point.

“You’ve got to hold nothing back because otherwise, how could this story be of service to anybody if I didn’t reveal so many things about myself that I might not want people to know, and so many things about her that I might not want people to know?” Gilbert says. “How in the world could we be of service unless we let ourselves be seen?” 

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Gilbert was Rayya’s caretaker as she thrashed through her last months, dying of “stage one million” liver and pancreatic cancer, as her doctor once put it. When Rayya slipped back into active addiction — “to let the dragon run one more time,” as Gilbert puts it, the pair became locked in a spiral that could only end in death — one way or another. 

That’s when Gilbert, in what she calls one of her bottoms as a sex and love addict, decided to kill Rayya herself. “As I say in the book, I’m the nice lady who wrote Eat, Pray, Love, and I was plotting a hit.”

“[Rayya] was just the most depraved version of herself,” Gilbert explains. “She was vicious and cruel and self-centered and manipulative, and all of the things that she wasn’t when she was sober.” 

As her caregiver, Gilbert felt powerless as Rayya’s addiction took over. Soon enough, Rayya was defying all expectations, “living on cigarettes, cocaine, fentanyl, morphine, steroids like Ambien Xanax … just like handfuls of drugs and alcohol.” And Gilbert was far past the end of her rope.

“How do you threaten a hospice patient with saying, ‘If you continue to use these drugs, you’re going to die’ when they’re already dying? She really felt like she could do whatever she wanted and it was killing me,” she explains. 

“She was wreaking absolute havoc on my life, and I got so sleep-deprived and kind of cornered by this, and I felt so entrapped,” Gilbert continues. “And one day, in total exhaustion, I was like, I have a really good idea. I think I’ll kill her. She’s dying anyway, and we’ve got all these drugs in the house, including all these Fentanyl patches, and if I can just figure out how to get her to take a handful of sleeping pills, I can knock her out, and then I can put these Fentanyl patches on and kill her. It just, to me, felt like a fantastic solution.”

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But, as Gilbert wryly points out, “If you ever find yourself in a situation where you’re plotting to either kill yourself or someone else, you’ve reached the end of your power and it’s probably a good idea that you ask for help.”

Not long after, Gilbert did just that (and, it may go without saying, did not go through with murdering Rayya). She called in reinforcements, including Rayya’s ex Stacy, who became her primary caregiver (the “gayest thing I was ever involved in,” Gilbert cracks). Over the years that followed Rayya’s passing, she began working the steps for her sex and love addiction, a process that bears its similarities to writing All the Way to the River. 

Chief among them? Realizing and coming to terms with her own role in Rayya’s life and death. 

“The crazy thing about it is once you’re in that process, I find there’s no shame left,” she reflects. “The stuff that I would have wanted to hide and conceal about myself, because I felt it was so shameful, it just is what it is.”

That hard-won perspective has brought Gilbert into a kind of lightness and a way of seeing the world that permeates her book, shining through three kinds of artistic communication. It’s a primer, of sorts, for what Gilbert calls “Earth school,” a framing she borrows in part from Buddhist philosophy.

“You’re here to have these experiences and to learn from them, and we cannot know what we don’t know until we know it,” she explains. “That is the innocence right there. And I needed to wrap myself in a cloak of innocence in order to be able to live. And I need to do that with others, because I’ve had to do that with myself as well.”

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All the Way to the River hits shelves on Sept. 9 and is available now for preorder, wherever books are sold.