Drama, drama, drama! with Elizabeth Gilbert

Frau shit.

NEXT!!!!

Thanks for posting, OP!

Elias, a former heroin addict who had been sober for years, slid back into addiction after her diagnosis. She stayed up all night in their East Village penthouse, ingesting whiskey, morphine, Vicodin, marijuana, fentanyl and thousands of dollars worth of cocaine, which Gilbert bought from teenagers in the neighborhood.

She had become abusive and paranoid, picking invisible bugs off her skin, ranting about police surveillance, lashing out at Gilbert over imaginary failings, and refusing to let Gilbert sleep or outsource care to a home aide. To cope with the stress, Gilbert was self-medicating with booze, Xanax, Ambien, psilocybin and MDMA.

Around the time she posted the video of Elias singing, things had gotten so bad that Gilbert decided the only way to save herself was murder. Exhausted and terrified, she planned to replace Elias’s morphine with sleeping pills, then cover her with enough fentanyl patches to kill her. She had swapped the pills and was prepared to act but abandoned the plan when Elias sensed something was up and confronted her.

Looking back on that moment, which she recounts with forensic detail in her new memoir, “All the Way to the River,” Gilbert still can’t believe how close she came to killing the love of her life, and how big the chasm became between her inspirational public persona and her hellish private life.

What began as a frantic, compressed love story as they tried to make the most of their limited time together morphed into a deranged bender. Back on hard drugs, Elias became a menace. Gilbert herself became unhinged, keeping the depths of her despair secret from all but a few close friends, until she ultimately decided to cut off Elias. In the final weeks of her life, Elias was sober and surrounded by friends and family. She reconciled with Gilbert, who was at her side when she died in 2018.

As in “Eat, Pray, Love,” the narrative bends toward redemption. Reeling from grief, Gilbert confronted her own sex and love addiction, and discovered that most of her problems stemmed from being “a crazy, needy, clingy, desperate, out-of-control, love-starved maniac.” Working within a 12-step program, she eventually regained spiritual equilibrium and peace.

Sounds absolutely exhausting.

This is why I stay faaaar away from women who call themselves "bi."

And as always, she went back to a man.

She is absolutely psycho but still makes big bucks from her legion of adoring fans.

I've only read her nonfiction "The Last American Man" which was good but I can't believe the credulousness of everyone reading this excerpt. "Oh my GOD she was going to MURDER her lover! She's horrible!"

FFS she's a writer and makes up this drama shit. It sells. She didn't even try to murder anyone, she says she thought about it. Who hasn't? Why people are going apeshit over this is beyond me.

My problem with her is the 'I'm always evolving and improving myself after hard lessons" trope, like so many memoirs. It's specious, middlebrow crap. This religion that we're all on a trajectory toward perfectibility and peace is so tiresome. The linked New Yorker article touches on the subject.

Is there a chapter in the book titled "Lesbian Bed Death?" If not, it sounds like there should have been one.

Why, R9?

Isn’t the entire book precisely about that?

Good point, R10.

^^ Signed by R9, ACT-SHULLY. It's one of those "reading DL while sipping adult beverages" afternoons.

Not this cunt again.

Some other family members objected to parts of the book. In an interview, Elias’s sister, who is not named in the book and requested that her name be withheld to speak about sensitive family matters, questioned some of the details, particularly the timeline of when Elias began to relapse, and said other parts felt embellished and exploitative, like when Gilbert detailed all the money she spent on Elias.

“We all knew from Day 1 that a book was going to be written and money was going to be made out of my sister’s death,” she said. “To me, Rayya should not be on display.”

Why wasn't the new book called, "Scissor, Snort, Attempted Murder, Abandon"?

Mmmmm....I don't like that scan. How about:

"Scissor, Snort, Kill, Mission Abort"

terminal cancer, go out with a bang

This is the woman that wrote that insipid eat pray love

Yeah, we know.

E.G. is a decent-enough writer but a MESS of a human being.

The stuff she wrote about Bali was such bullshit.

R21 As far as I can tell all travel writing is bullshit. It's tourists writing extended Yelp reviews.

I would never read crap like EPL anyway -- I just found it interesting that somehow she fell for this ugly lesbian and let the drama turn her life upside down.

I'm so happy I lost my sex drive and I've been deliberately single and celibate since 2008.

The only interesting part of the story to me is- thst an ex-heroin addict relapsed when they got terminal cancer. I’ve always wondered why addicts don’t all relapse in that scenario - but especially heroin addicts. If you know you’re dying a slow painful death from cancer, why not just enjoy the thing you enjoyed so much? Seems like anyone who is given a terminal diagnosis should just enjoy what they enjoyed most in life. Especially if thst also relieves the physical - and psychological - pain of thst illness.

what was written about bali? I've never read any of her work. I dislike Julia Roberts and won't bother seeing the film.

Agreed, R24.

That is interesting, and it's one of those ironies Joan Didion could have explored with depth and insight.

Elizabeth "And Then This Happened to Me Me Me" Gilbert is no Joan Didion.

What was so great about EPL? I remember Oprah going crazy over it like it was some profound piece of literature. Then the fraus sitting in her audience with their mouths open listening to Gilbert speak. But it was just such basic "I went to Italy and had amazing sex and spaghetti" shit.

Has she written a book on fibromyalgia yet? She seems the type.

Eat, Pray, Die

It sounds like she falls madly in love with people just to be madly in love, Drug addicts are good marks for that because they’re not in any position to escape.

I knew Rayya. She was a lovely person, inside and out.

She cut my hair for the better part of a decade out of her apartments in the East Village. She was an accomplished stylist. I've never had a better haircut.

She was smart, hilarious, and gave me a lot of good advice in just about every category. (I had just moved to the city when we met.) I knew Elizabeth Gilbert was a close friend; Rayya mentioned her several times.

That said, I 100% believe Gilbert jumped into this situation to get a book out of it. She is not gay. She may be a sex/love addict, but in this situation, she revealed herself to be something closer to a sociopath. Opportunistic, exploitative.

How could you write something so disgraceful about your great friend and "great love"? This is how you want them to be remembered?

R18 I did not know that, didn't recognize the name and yay I missed it all.

Just one question, would make a good Dateline? Did someone get bumped off?

OK, R30 -- but was all the drug use true?

When I knew her, Rayya was open about being an addict in recovery. She even wrote a very good memoir a few years before she got sick.

I have no insight into what happened during her "relationship" with Gilbert.

I question Gilbert's appetite to exploit the details for income when she has plenty of money already. (Unless I missed the part where she's donating all proceeds to cancer or addiction research.)

I also wonder if she didn't coax Rayya's destructive behavior along for material. I wouldn't be surprised.

Never heard of her. But I would read it.

I’m sorry about your friend. Gilbert seems like a attention starved sociopath who do anything for a buck so it’s a possibility @R33

Who will play poor Rayya in the inevitable Netflix mover adaptation? Of course they'll dust off America's Sweetheart, Julia Roberts to reprise her EPL persona as Liz. But whose snatch will that Method Actress be munching?

Sara Ramirez

All the Way to the River?

All the Way to the Bank is more like it.