Author Elizabeth Gilbert identifies as a "love addict" and a "blackout codependent."
"I get so swept up in somebody that I actually kind of lose my brains and wake up similar to the way that a black-out alcoholic would wake up months later and be like, 'Oh my god, what just happened to my life?' " Gilbert explains. "That's something that I've done numerous times with numerous people starting at a very young age."
Gilbert's 2006 memoir, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia, chronicled her year of post-divorce travel and self discovery, and was turned into a movie starring Julia Roberts. Her latest book, All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation, tells the story of Gilbert's relationship with Rayya Elias.
Gilbert first knew Elias as her hairstylist, but the two quickly became best friends. When Elias was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic and liver cancer in 2016, the women admitted that their feelings went deeper than friendship, and Gilbert eventually left her husband to be with Elias.
"Both of us, it turns out, later we would find out, were secretly in love with each other and had slowly fallen in love with each over a decade and a half of friendship," Gilbert says of Elias.
Earlier in her life, Elias had struggled with addiction to heroin and cocaine. As her cancer progressed, she returned to drugs — and Gilbert became her enabler.
"That was a kind of collision of both of our rock bottoms," Gilbert says. "If the most degraded version of Rayya was a low-bottom opioid and cocaine addict who became very manipulative and abusive and quite terrifying for me to live with, the lowest version of myself — what I would call a sort of relapse in my life — is an enabler who has no boundaries, who will do absolutely anything to be loved, who will pay for everything, who will just constantly try to be pleasing, who will allow herself to be abused."
At one point, Gilbert says, she considered killing Elias by giving her a combination of sleeping pills and fentanyl patches. "I could see no other way out. And it felt like the degree of my insanity ... as to how crazy I was was that it seemed like a really good idea in that moment," she says.
Eighteen months after her diagnosis, Elias died of cancer in 2018. Seven years later, Gilbert says she finally feels ready to talk about their relationship: "It took me so long after she died to process what indeed had happened and what my role had been ... [and] how it was that we sort of soared to the highest heights and also collapse to the lowest depths."
Following the release of Gilbert's new memoir, public reaction has been polarized. Some of Elias' family members reportedly have objected to parts of the book, disputing some of Gilbert's account of Rayya's relapse and decline.
Interview highlights
On Elias' struggle with addiction
The simplest way that I can express it is that, you know, Rayya, who had been a heroin and cocaine addict for a long portion of her adult life, and who had found recovery years earlier and was so very proud of having found recovery when she was faced with the real pain. And the real terror of her imminent death. She went back to that. She went to the oldest way that she knew to not feel emotional and physical pain and very quickly escalated into absolutely harrowing drug addiction. And I had never known Rayya as a drug addict. I had known her story because she talked about it a lot. She was so open about her addiction and about her recovery. It was a big part of how she identified herself.
On a really difficult point in their relationship
I was at the end of myself and she was at the end of herself. It was a situation that had become kind of the very definition of unmanageable. Her drug addiction was so devastating and nightmarish and she had turned into somebody who is paranoid and abusive and aggressive, and who also wasn't sleeping because cocaine addicts don't sleep, and also wasn't allowing me to sleep, and also wasn't allowing anyone else to take care of her, had pushed away all the other people close in our life, had push away the hospice people who were taking care of her. And who was also in hospice, so had access to limitless drugs through hospice and also whatever street drugs she was procuring at the same time.
I was trying to fix it and control it and manage it and I was breaking and she was breaking. And there was no possibility of an intervention because how do you have an intervention with a drug addict who's got a terminal cancer diagnosis and is in hospice? You know what I mean? What do you say, like if you keep doing this, you're going to die? ... She was nodding off, smoking in bed, setting things on fire. And I was insane. I was so in my own disease [sex and love addiction] and in my horror and also in my own withdrawal from this person who I had idealized as the one person in the world I ever felt completely safe around, who had now become the most dangerous person I'd ever been around.
On writing about unflattering parts of herself
I wrote about it because this story doesn't make any sense unless I tell the whole story. And I was going to be writing, and Rayya knew that I was gonna be writing the entire truth of this story. And to withhold anything in order to make myself look better felt very unethical to me. And the book is about the way our addictions and our compulsions fired off of each other to lead us both into insanity. And I was not interested, once I decided to write this book, in my image management because I was interested in the truth and I was interested in showing what codependency and sex and love addiction can lead a person into. Even a person who presents as somebody who's got it all together, which is how I was out there in the world presenting.
On Gilbert's role as a financial caretaker
It's complex. First of all, I also have to acknowledge what happened to my financial life after Eat, Pray, Love. It's like the universe was driving dump trucks into my backyard and dumping cash into my backyard. It was shocking. I was grateful for it and nothing in my entire life, or how I had been raised or how had ever lived, had prepared me for how to process that. And I'm also a really generous person. It's messy, it's murky, right? But that's a very gray area for me.
And, I've heard this story from people who have sudden wealth, that this is a sort of stage of it. It is like, I don't know how to deal with this. And I want to help everybody and I love everybody and I'm uncomfortable with having this. And then, you know, you learn. And in some of those instances, it was absolutely wonderful what I was able to do. It was so mutually beautiful and pure. And then, in other cases, my codependency and my need to fix, manage and control other people's lives because I can't handle my own showed up. And other people [who wanted] to be taken care of forever showed up, and we got ourselves into deep, messy enmeshment.
On Elias and her family's thoughts on the book
[Elias] was sort of mandating it [be written]. We both very much wanted that. ... I sent it to [Elias' family] a year ago when it was in manuscript. ... [Their reactions] ranged from a few of her relatives who just loved it, and felt like as one of her nephews said, I feel like I'm so glad there was a writer living with her when she was dying. ... And then there were some factual questions that were brought up at the time that there was disagreement about in terms of how we remembered it. And wherever anybody expressed that disagreement about how it was remembered, I took those parts out. I just said to everybody, let me know if there's anything in here that is unfair or untrue and made sure that everything in there was as fair and true as I could make it and that everybody knew it was happening. I felt like that was really important.
On insights she learned while attending a 12-step program
I do love a description of 12 Step as, like, it's a simple program for complicated people. You know, I like to think I'm really smart, and it's good for me to sit in a room where it's like, doesn't matter how smart you are, honey, like your life is uncontrollable. An old timer very early on in a recovery meeting gave me this great piece of advice and just said, "Pick one of those slogans that you're rolling your eyes at and marry it ... and see if it can actually help you." And the one I picked was "one day at a time." Because I can spiral out into such shame thinking about the past. I can spiral out and to such anxiety thinking about the future. And the only place that I'm really safe is right here. You know and so we're just doing Wednesday today. We're just going to do Wednesday and Wednesday is good.
On not reading criticism of her books
I think about what John Updike said, that reading reviews of books that you have written is like eating a sandwich that might have some broken glass in it. And I let my publishers know and I said, "Listen, I don't even want to see the good stuff." Like, I didn't even wanna see the praise. I don't wanna see, I'm not reading any of the articles that I wrote. With all respect to you and as much as I love Fresh Air, I won't be listening to this interview. ... It's not even so much that I'm protecting my tender tender feelings; it's that I'm protecting my emotional sobriety.
Sam Briger and Anna Bauman produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the web.
Copyright 2025 NPR
