Elizabeth Gilbert's particular brand of crazy

[Holluschickie]

I have a love-hate relationship with her. I hated Eat Pray Love, but I loved Signature of All Things and her magazine journalism.

But I really need to discuss this piece about her new book, where she sourced coke for her dying lover and tried to murder her! https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/01/all-the-way-to-the-river-love-loss-and-liberation-elizabeth-gilbert-book-review It's paywalled, sorry. But I used remove paywall.

Oooohhhh, thanks for sharing...! (especially as I consider myself queen of free access, but didn't know abut RemovePaywall 😉 so thanks for that top tip!)

I share your love/hate relationship with her books. She's brilliant and crazy in equal measure. She somehow manages to elevate the grotesque, stupid and repugnant to transcendent metaphysics, which is both annoying and impressive. As a writer, she's in a stratospherically different league to Glennon Doyle, who I find absolutely insufferable.

The stuff she gets up to does remind me of myself when I experimented with psychedelics in my 40s - a heady combination of exercising absolutely no social filter or self-control while at the same time framing everything as a fucking spiritual journey towards enlightenment 😆 The magical thinking wore thin eventually, but it's possible that being immensely rich traps her in whatever loony-tunes narrative she prefers to indulge. You don't face the consequences of bad choices in quite the same way if you're not scared of mortgage arrears or aggressive ex-BFs.

I do remember watching this a while ago - her describing Rayya dying. It's very funny.

No, I didn't use Remove Paywall, sorry. It's archive.ph.

I couldn't open the article via your link, so used this based on you saying "But I used remove paywall" 😊
https://www.removepaywall.com/

I have a love-hate relationship with her. I hated Eat Pray Love, but I loved Signature of All Things and her magazine journalism.
Me too! I also love Big Magic and listen to it about once a year. Its not really what I normally go for but I find her narration of it is really inspiring. EPL just makes me cringe though - maybe it is a British thing?

I read a similar piece in the Guardian at the weekend. I actually really enjoyed Eat Pray Love but haven't read any of her other stuff.

I remember reading years ago that she had ended her marriage and started a relationship with a friend - something about it seemed very strange. It makes more sense now as she describes it through the lens of addiction and a highly toxic combination of people

Good to hear that she's clean and sober these days

Guardian piece.
She tried to kill her lover! Makes atll that Zen pontificating about love and life in Big Magic seem very fake.

www.theguardian.com/books/2025/aug/30/eat-pray-love-author-elizabeth-gilbert-leaving-marriage-dying-friend

I wonder how healthy it is to make your fame , fortune and career from basically just talking about yourself. I am thinkig also of the Salt Path saga (and maybe you could include Taylor Swift though the isn't all about TS to quite the same extent) - highly successful artists/artistes/ are trading on basically -themselves and their lives.

I am not 100% sure what im trying to express here but it must strip a layer off you somehow and at the same time, make you have to think about yourself and think youre important in a way that surely doesn't come naturally to a normal person with outside interests. Does it end up making you view the other people in your life as "material" too.

Anyway- I'm not surprised she's a bit odd/nutty. Either she was anyway, or the excessive success of epl has made it hard to stay grounded - as I am sure it would many of us.

Yes, it's a pattern for some writers. I am a published writer too. Not famous. Don't sell much. I don't write about myself.
But increasingly the industry demands that writers cannibalise their own lives.

That's an extraordinary article. As usual, what makes it so uniquely "her" is the brutal honesty.

I'm curious about her attraction to Rayya:
Rayya didn’t fall in love with me that day, either. I was nothing like her other friends. I wasn’t punk, cool, tough, edgy. There was nothing street about me.

Sometimes I think we're drawn to people who can complete our experience of life and make us "stronger" in areas where we consider ourselves "weak." I certainly did this in midlife after my divorce: I felt I'd had a rather sheltered life (though by no means an easy one), so I plunged headlong into every risk I encountered. (If I was into tatts, I could have her "I was somewhat out of my mind back then is what I’m saying" inscribed across my forehead!)

Maybe part of the attraction for EG was wanting to step away from "I mean, I’m the nice lady who wrote Eat Pray Love"...?

I started reading about this in the Guardian over the weekend and thought it sounded chaotic, overwhelming and honestly totally nuts. I gave up on the article.

I read the article and was fascinated. I absolutely adored the signature of all things and recently read city of girls, which I also really enjoyed. So I think she is a fantastic writer. But as a person she seems to have so many types of drama it makes my head spin, seems enough for four lifetimes. But it is weirdly fascinating that she’s willing to be so open about it and write beautifully while she does it. Think I prefer her fiction though.

A lot of reviewers think it's brave, raw, apply adjective of your choice. I sent it to another friend and she claimed sourcing coke and needles for your dying lover, then abandoning them was quite normal for some! I wonder if Rayya was ok with this.

Drug abuse in the USA seems to be on a whole other level than in the UK. There's an A&E "Intervention" series on YouTube with short videos showing individuals who have spiralled into addiction and then either managed or failed to reclaim their lives followed forced intervention. It makes for gruesome and mind-boggling viewing... ordinary families describing how their sister/uncle/daughter/whatever rapidly got hooked on crack, meth, heroin, fentanyl, and often a combination of whatever they could get their hands on.

'I wonder how healthy it is to make your fame , fortune and career from basically just talking about yourself'

Very good point. Probably even more of a concern when you're wildly successful and have so many people telling you you're the best thing ever. I guess it can only lead to off-the-scale self-absorption

'But as a person she seems to have so many types of drama it makes my head spin, seems enough for four lifetimes'

I agree, it does seem to be endless drama. Maybe that was part of her addiction too. She did sound absolutely obsessed with her husband (the Brazilian guy) and then seems to have become utterly obsessed with Rayya too while still married to him

Bloody hell, that's bleak..she wrote about it on social media at the time like it was the best love story ever..

I also did not know you could get so rich from writing books, maybe it was the movie too.

She just doesn't seem okay, is an addiction to love really an addiction..

Your 40s sound interesting @Beachtastic !

I read both articles with my jaw on the floor. An unstable narcissist who makes everything about her, even her partner's death 😐

Wow, that is some crazy stuff.

Yes... and not always in a good way 🤣 but I was making up for lost time! I'd had a lifetime of being bored, so seized every chance to experience new things. I'm actually glad I did, because it's all helped to shape the very tranquil and harmonious life I have now. I hope the same for EG one day, but have a funny feeling there is a bit more going on with her (e.g. perhaps undiagnosed bipolar???)