Twenty years after Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert is back with a second memoir that’s yet another wild ride, from divorcing her husband, to coming out as queer and marrying her terminally ill best friend, and then coming to terms with their twin addictions
Gilbert and Elias tied the knot in an informal commitment ceremony in 2017; (right) the author has described Elias as “her person” and “the love of her life”. Pics/Instagram @elizabeth_gilbert_writer
I came up with the plan late one night when she had been awake for many hours, staring into a mirror with her eye only one inch away from the reflective surface, yelling at the demon that she swore she could see in her eye’s reflection—a demon who, she kept insisting, “lives all the way down there at the bottom of my brain.”
“It’s you again!” she was shouting at the demon. “You again! You stole my f*#king Rolex this time!”
Elizabeth Gilbert and Rayya Elias had known each other, were best friends, for 17 years before Elias’ cancer diagnosis forced them to confront their true feeling about each other. Pic/Getty Images
It was not easy to sleep through this rant, especially when she kept waking me up and making me come to the bathroom and stare in the mirror with her to prove that the demon was indeed right there inside her eye and that, moreover, the demon was wearing her watch. (Needless to say, her watch was on her wrist the whole time, so I suppose it’s pretty obvious who the demon in the mirror actually was.)
“Motherf*#@er thinks it can f*#k with me,” muttered Rayya. “Doesn’t know who it’s f*@king with, does it, babe? You tell it. You tell it who it’s fucking with. I’m Rayya fucking Elias, that’s who I am. You tell it, babe. You tell it!”
Elizabeth Gilbert. Pic/Deborah Lopez
She has to die now, said my exhausted mind—and suddenly this seemed like a terrific solution. After all, Rayya was dying already anyway, right? I just needed to move the process along before things got even worse, before she set the whole building on fire with a dropped cigarette or got us both arrested.
She had to die, and I was the one who had to kill her.
I decided I would do it the next day.
I went back to sleep that night in peace, knowing that liberation was finally in sight.
Her new memoir, All The Way To The River, is centered on her relationship with Elias and addiction
I want to make something extremely clear here: When I say that I once planned to murder Rayya, I don’t mean that the idea simply crossed my mind that my life would be easier if she were gone. I mean that I fully intended to kill her. And I tell this story in all its raw honesty, because I want people to understand how insane codependency can make a person become. I mean, I’m the nice lady who wrote Eat Pray Love. And I came very close to premeditatedly and cold-bloodedly murdering my partner because she had taken her affection away from me, and because I was extremely tired.
That’s the sort of person
I become when I’m in my insanity.
The next morning, while Rayya nodded off in front of the TV, I stole some of her sleeping pills and morphine pills and took them to the park with me. While my fellow New Yorkers went about their business in the beautiful summer light, I sat on a bench, studying and comparing the two medications in the palm of my hand, trying to figure out how I could make the sleeping pills look like the morphine pills so I could trick her into taking a bunch of them. I needed her to take the sleeping pills, not the morphine pills — which no longer had much of an effect on her stubbornly resistant drug addict’s nervous system — because if I could knock her out with the sleeping pills, then I could stick a whole bunch of fentanyl patches on her back once she was unconscious, and that would surely kill her. The pills were different sizes, but they were the same color. One set of pills was scored, the other wasn’t. If I got a razor blade and scored the sleeping pills, perhaps I could get her to think they were the morphine pills? Or would Rayya even notice if all the pills were mixed up together? She was so blinded by drugs at this point that she might just swallow them without noticing, if I just handed them to her. But she was also deeply paranoid. She had taken over management of her pill protocol months earlier — fearful, I think, that I would deny her the drugs she wanted. Her suspicions might be triggered by my giving her a handful of pills and a glass of water and telling her to down them.
I would have to be careful about this murder, I knew — not because I was afraid of the police (I wasn’t even thinking about the police, I was so out of my mind) but because I was really, really afraid of Rayya. If she woke up and realized I was trying to murder her, I’d be dead. Literally dead. If I didn’t kill her, she would kill me. So I had only one chance, I reckoned, to do the job right. But I believed I could do it — and that I could do it with a steady hand. Somebody had to do it. Somebody had to put an end to this nightmare.
When I returned to the apartment, my mood was strangely buoyant. I felt quite proud of myself for my courage. Not everyone is clever or brave enough to do what I intended to do that day!
I walked in cheerfully, saying, “Hi, honey! I’m back!”
Rayya looked up at me from her seat by the coffee table — which was, as always, covered with cocaine and pills and booze.
Without even blinking, and in a voice that was dead calm and sober, she said, “Don’t you start plotting against me now, Liz.”
For a long, long time, we held each other’s gazes in silence.
In that moment, it felt as if there were a break in the universe.
It was as if someone had pressed Pause on the outrageous little drama we were acting out, and we had both dropped our costumes and were staring at each other as undefended souls, stripped of our identities, history, and egos.
Here we were again, back in the cosmic boardroom at the beginning of time, recognizing each other once more and deciding to go on this journey together.
How far would we take it?
Excerpted with permission from All The Way To The River by Elizabeth Gilbert, published by Bloomsbury Publishing
Subscribe today by clicking the link and stay updated with the latest news!" Click here!
