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You may be aware that Elizabeth Gilbert has a new memoir out this week, All the Way to the River. Oprah Winfrey even announced it was her book club’s new pick. Like many Americans, I’ve been following Gilbert’s career since 1997, when she released her GQ article about working at Coyote Ugly that was later adapted into the movie of the same name. I’ve read all of Gilbert’s memoirs and novels. As a memoirist, I find it impossible not to have opinions about her work; whether or not you liked Eat, Pray, Love, you have to admit that its style set the tone for much of the first-person writing — by white women, sure, but also by everyone else — published in the decades that followed. Gilbert is currently using her prominent voice to do something markedly different from everything she’s previously written, not in style but in substance. After Gilbert’s best friend, a recovering addict named Rayya, was diagnosed with terminal cancer, Gilbert realized she and Rayya were in love. Gilbert left her husband, and she and Rayya embarked on a sexy, druggy, drunken yearlong bacchanal that stopped short when Rayya started actively dying and relapsed on hard drugs, which Gilbert had to supply. After Rayya’s death, the book turns into a memoir of Gilbert’s addiction and recovery, giving Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous a bigger platform than it’s had since that AA offshoot was founded in 1976. I talked to Gilbert on the phone a few weeks ago about the lengthy, bumpy process of writing the book, whether she cares about how it’s received, and the misconceptions around sex and love addiction.
Did you work on this book differently than you worked on previous books?
In keeping with how everything about Rayya was different from anybody else that I ever knew, everything about writing about her was different from everything that I ever knew. This version is actually the third iteration of this book, and each version of it was completely different because it took me seven years to figure out how to even tell this story. Within a year after she died, I went away and I wrote a novella, a ghost story, with very thinly disguised versions of her and me. And I felt like, Maybe this is how I do this. If I fictionalize it and if I turn it into a ghost story, maybe then I can get at the feeling of the thing without actually having to talk about the thing, I can disguise it and I’ll be safer in the telling of it. I showed that to my agent and I was like, Here, I wrote this. Don’t show this to anybody. I don’t think this is it. But it was part of it. It was the beginning of it. And then I wrote this whole other book that’s just the prayers and the poems that are in this version, but it was only that, and that was called “Aftermath.” I was like, Maybe I can just write in an oblique way about the feelings of grief and the feelings of addiction and the feelings of recovery, but again, without having to go into the belly of the beast and directly talk about it. I still didn’t even know what had happened. I think it took me a good five years after Rayya died for me to be able to sort through what happened.
“Aftermath” was a good title because it was like surviving a bad car accident that happened really quickly. Wait a minute, wait, what happened to my marriage? What happened to my best friend? What happened to our relationship? What happened to her addiction? What literally just happened in my life? And it took a lot of years for me to sort through that enough to be able to sit down and do this version, which is, I think, the unblinking forensic version. Let’s actually sit down and answer that question of what happened without looking away from it or speaking metaphorically. Let’s just go right to the heart of the truth. But it took me a long time to figure out what that truth even was. I’ve never worked harder on a book or longer or in so many different ways.
Did you worry about how the book will be received?
No.
No?
I don’t think that was why it took so long to write. Truly. I truly think that I didn’t know what had happened and I only knew how it felt. I literally did not know how I had gotten myself into such a traumatic situation or how this person, who was the person I trusted and felt that I knew more than anyone else in the world, had become this darkest, unrecognizable version of herself, or how I had become so degraded. I think if I had written the book directly after Rayya had died — and in essence the novella that I didn’t publish kind of was this — it would be a book about what a nice person I am and what a bad thing happened to me. I really didn’t get what my part was in this.
In 12-step recovery, they always say it takes five years just to get your marbles back. Five years of recovery before you can think straight. And that is right in line with kind of how it went for me, where it was this slow dawning like, Oh, I see what I did. And not only that, It’s like I see what I do. I see what I continually do. I see what I’ve been doing my whole life. I mean, the sponsor very early on who gave me this wonderful line said something like, it’s almost like Rayya and I, over the course of almost 20 years, very slowly co-created this nightmare with each other. She said, “Liz, the word codependency has the prefix co- built right into it, right at the top of the word. So you can see it as a clue.” This is something that you created together.
But I couldn’t see it. I was still in so much grief, and I was still in so much anger and so much loss and just bewilderment. And so I don’t think that my hesitation was like, “Oh my God, people must never know about this.” I think my hesitation was like, one, I don’t know how to tell this story. Two, I don’t even know what this story is. Three, I don’t even know if I have the courage to go back and look so deeply again at the worst thing I ever went through.
So now that it’s done, I feel like my focus has been so much upon the creative challenges of the book, the creative and emotional challenges of the book. One of the big ones for me was, Can I even describe Rayya? She was not a particularly easy person to describe. And can I get it over the net? Do I have the capacity, artistically, to bring this very vivid, very contradictory, very unusual person to life on the page in such a way that somebody would even understand why I loved her?
And now that it’s done and I feel really grounded in the expression of this book, I feel really settled. That’s what I was trying to say. That’s why all this went down. This is what it felt like. This is what it means, who she was. This is who I am. I feel really relaxed actually about putting it out into the world. In a way, my part of the job is over. I have the public-facing part of the job now, which to me is much simpler than the writing of the book. The public-facing part is just like, I’ll go to the places and I’ll answer the people’s questions, and they’re a lot easier to answer now because I feel like I do understand what occurred.
Wow. I’m so jealous.
It’s a lot of heavy lifting to get there, I have to say. Years of sitting in recovery meetings, years of doing the steps, years and years of prayer.
When did you first begin to think of yourself as an addict and accept that you are an addict?
Two different answers. So I always knew there was something wrong with me. I mean, I used all the language of addiction to describe myself. It felt like the only language that could accurately convey how depraved I become and how desperate and how much abandonment of self there is and how little power I have over it. This has been the issue that I’ve been working on my entire life, working on it really hard, throwing everything there is at it, like 25 years of therapy. I basically had a couples therapist on retainer because I kept bringing different partners to him. I saw him recently, we actually went out to lunch and I was like, “Hey, Mark, did you ever have another client who brought you three different relationships over the course of 20 years? And none of them were the people she was married to?” And he was like, “Nope, that’s all yours, kid.” And he was really funny about it. He was like, “It was always interesting because I never knew who you were going to bring in, but they were all so different from each other that it was always fascinating. So it didn’t feel like you were in a pattern.” I was in a pattern, but the pattern was just casting a really wide net. Will this work? Would a woman work? Would somebody much older than me work? Would somebody who loves me more than I love them work? Would somebody who I love more than they love me work? Will open marriage work? I was throwing everything I had at this intimacy problem and throwing spiritual resources at it as well. So it’s not like I was in denial that there was something. I could see that other people weren’t doing what I was doing.
And I felt so much shame! Why can I not get there? Why can I not figure this out? I’m so good at so many other things. Why am I so terribly bad at this? And it doesn’t help that we live in a culture that upholds partnership, and especially marriage, as the highest achievement, especially for a woman. This is your signal of health. This is the sign that you’ve arrived. I had heard of sex addiction, but what I understood sex addiction to be was not how I was acting, although I definitely have always used sex as a way to try to get these bottomless, cavernous emotional needs met. Like, If I can manipulate somebody with sex, then maybe they will fix me. But I thought of sex addiction as being a set of behaviors that was very different from what I was up to — I thought it involved pornography addiction and sex workers and massage parlors and rampant promiscuity. So I didn’t identify that way until a friend of mine who’s an alcoholic in recovery pointed me toward rooms of sex and love addiction. And that’s where the penny started to drop.
I don’t go into detail about this in the book, and I don’t want to go into detail about it out of the book because it involves other people, and I’m really careful about that. But it took me acting out again after Rayya died, and finding myself in the same horror movie that I’m always in, to finally be like, Okay, I really have a problem. And that problem is called addiction. And when that landed, there was enormous relief. Just like any addict where it’s like, Oh, wait, maybe there’s hope. Maybe there can be a transformation of consciousness here where I don’t have to do this for the rest of my life, because I’m exhausted and I don’t want to just keep being broken in the same way again and again, and causing harm to myself and causing harm to others, which is even worse, for me, because I think my true nature is a nature of deep kindness. And in my true nature, I would never want to exploit somebody, manipulate them, control them, or use them for my own purposes in any way. That’s so abhorrent to me. And so when I do that, I become abhorrent to myself. I just don’t ever fucking want to do that again. My conscience can’t take it.
It wasn’t like I wasn’t out there looking for answers. I mean, I wrote my entire book Committed, a 300-page exploration of the institution of marriage. I was like, If I can just understand this thing from an academic standpoint, if I can become an expert on this, then I’ll divorceproof myself. I will heartbreakproof myself through knowledge. But there’s a line in the Big Book of AA that I love that says “Self-knowledge availed us nothing.” I could have written a doctoral thesis by the time I was 35 called “Why I Act Like This.” I know exactly, from a psychological standpoint, why I act like this. I know exactly what happened to me. I know exactly what I was raised in. But knowing that and even becoming kind of an expert on it didn’t stop me from doing it. And that’s where the compulsion that we would call addiction comes in. There’s something that’s wired in you at some point so deeply that you can’t reach it with intellect. That’s what was so shocking for me. I’m used to being able to learn things and then do things differently. I learned, yeah, because I’m a good learner, I’m a good student. Why can I not learn my way out of this? But I couldn’t.
For me, one of the amazing revelations of early sobriety was that for the first time in my life, in doing step work and sharing, I was not performing or trying to be “good” at expressing myself. That was hard because my brain is very conditioned to perform. But it ultimately was liberating, and I ended up loving it and finding so much value in it. I’m not the only writer, I’m sure, who’s had this experience, but I was wondering if that was part of your experience, too, because you’re one of the most famous living memoirists. So I imagine it must’ve been like that for you, but times Oprah.
As you were saying that, what came into my mind was I have a friend whose dad was a minister, and she grew up in the church. He used to say, “The most beautiful thing that is happening in this church is not the thing that happens above ground on Sunday in the really orchestrated church service with the stained glass and the choir and everybody dressed perfectly, and the kids all shined up, and my good sermon. That’s theater. The only place in this church where God is happening is in the basement with the mice and the cockroaches and the shitty-smelling carpet and folding chairs where the various 12-step meetings come and people tell the truth, the unvarnished truth.” And I feel like that’s maybe what you were getting at, that unpolished speech and truth telling.
There’s nowhere in the world I would rather be than in one of those rooms, like any of ’em. And whenever there’s an open meeting of anything, I’ll go to it, just to sit in truth telling, because where else is that happening? There’s a lot of confessional stuff that happens on the internet, but I’m not sure that it’s the same as that rigorous honesty. The thing that I find so moving is the rigorous self-accountability, even when people are being confessional. It makes a lot of sense to me now why I fell so in love with Rayya, because the part of Rayya that I loved more than anything was the recovery stuff.
In Eat, Pray, Love, I write about this guy Richard from Texas, who I now realize was kind of my first sponsor, who I met in India, and he was an alcoholic in recovery, and he sponsored a lot of people. He was an old-timer, and he was on the same spiritual path I was on. I met him at this ashram. I look back now, and all the things that he was saying to me that were turning my head around and putting my heart in order and filling me with this sense of hope and healing, that was all recovery stuff. And the same with Rayya. It was like, Oh, this is what I was so attracted to in these people, their rigorous honesty. I didn’t have anywhere else in my life where I saw people doing that. I didn’t grow up with that, and I wasn’t surrounded by people who were doing that.
I was just talking with somebody who’s going through some real shit about how, in the end, the reality is such a good friend, and it’s the thing I’ve spent my entire life trying to avoid. The truth is something I’ve been trying to avoid, but once you drop down into reality and make friends with it, it’s the safest place in the universe to be. I have a fellow who, she and I call each other once a week and leave a message saying “This is what I don’t want anyone knowing about me today.” Having a place to put your petty little shit, your little evils, your little judgments. Just taking them out and showing them to somebody who’s like, Yeah, I get that, and neutralizing them. It’s incredible.
What are you up to these days?
“Good Orderly Direction” on a personal level, that’s what I’m up to every day. I know it’s an adage, but anything I put above my recovery, I’ll lose. So truly, my recovery is the most important thing in my life. Monitoring my nervous system and staying well is pretty much a full-time job for me. I spent a lot of my life outsourcing that job and trying to get somebody else to do it. There were people who really wanted to do that for me, and they couldn’t. So there’s three or four hours of things a day that I do to stay well, that I get to do, to stay well. So if I’m lucky, that will always be my every day. And the great thing is when I do those things, I don’t act out. I don’t use other people like drugs. I don’t run away from my shit. It really works for me, but it’s a big job. And being stable is not an easy job, but it’s my job. I’m glad to know that now that it’s my job. So that’s my ongoing project. Creatively, the thing where all my love and heart is going right now is I’ve got this Substack called Letters From Love, where I’m sharing with people this practice that I’ve done for years where I write myself a letter every day from the spirit of unconditional love. That’s become kind of my anchoring, guiding system. It’s my higher power. And the question of the day each day is, Dear love, what would you have me know today?
Those letters have become my navigational system. I’ve wondered for a long time whether that could be taught, so I decided to start this experiment on Substack where I do my best to try to teach that practice and then every week I invite a special guest to come and try it, which has been so beautiful. This huge variety of people who come in and attempted to do this, to speak to themselves from a place of unconditional love. And so that takes a lot of time because there’s 200,000 people in that community now, and I read every single one of the letters that people post because people are out there in that community writing their own versions of this. And I feel like it’s part of my spiritual practice to read those letters. That’s where my attention’s been on building that community and sharing that practice with people.
Wow. Talk about using the power of Substack for good.
Substack itself is an interesting experiment. I think a lot of us are looking for ways to be able to commune that aren’t destructive. I feel like social media is a party drug that we all started taking 10, 15 years ago in big doses. It was like, this is so fun. And now we’re all addicted to it, and no one’s getting high off it anymore. It’s just maintenance.
Also maybe it was a mistake to let a bunch of young men with limited understanding of how people think and communicate design the way that we think and communicate most often with each other.
I remember when it was so thrilling to be like, Oh my God, we are from all over the world in real time having this conversation right now online! This is incredible. The activism that you can do from here is going to be so world changing. And now it’s actually going to destroy democracy. Anyway, for the moment, we’re trying Substack. So far, the community that’s growing on that page is really, really something special.
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