The New Yorker:

“Eat, Pray, Love” was a huge hit in part because readers imagined they could be like its author. Her new book, “All the Way to the River,” shows how dubious that notion was.

By Jia Tolentino

“Elizabeth Gilbert has a new memoir out.” The mere sentence radiates gentle inspiration—watercolors, billowy pants with elephants printed on them, sparkly truthtelling in a big straw hat. Gilbert had an estimable career as a journalist and a writer of fiction before she published “Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia,” in 2006, a book that became not just a best-seller or even a phenomenon but something more like a cultural paradigm. Gilbert’s autobiographical account of a yearlong, post-divorce, mid-thirties rediscovery of herself was read by millions, many of whom, when they picture Gilbert, likely see Julia Roberts, who starred in the film adaptation, which grossed two hundred million dollars worldwide. Upon hearing that Gilbert has written another memoir—her first proper return to that deliriously, exclusively personal form since “Eat, Pray, Love,” although she’s published four other books in the interim—these readers may imagine that they’re in for more of what was on the movie poster: a plucky blonde, gelato spoon in mouth, ready for adventure and revelation to blow in on the breeze.

Here is what actually happens in the new book, called “All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation.” Gilbert, newly flush with seemingly unlimited cash, and filled with both a desire to be useful and the existential unease of someone who has just won the lottery, begins covering her friends’ therapy bills and tuition payments, and lavishing jewelry, weddings, and houses (plural) on them. At one point, after the 2008 financial crisis, she walks down a street in New Jersey asking small-business owners if they need money. Then her friend Rayya—a hot queer hairdresser whom Gilbert met during her first marriage—hits a rough patch, and Gilbert moves her out of a Chelsea apartment and into a New Jersey church that she bought sight unseen from Laos. (Gilbert had intended it to be a home for herself and her second husband, whom she met during her “Eat, Pray, Love” year.) Gilbert falls in love with Rayya, though she doesn’t admit this to Rayya or to her husband. Instead, she proposes that Rayya write a memoir in lieu of paying rent, and asks her to travel with her, ostensibly so that Rayya can do her hair and makeup for professional appearances. By 2013, Gilbert is admitting to a stranger in a book-signing line that the only reason she and Rayya aren’t a couple is that Gilbert is married and “trying to be good.” Rayya, who is an alcoholic and a heroin addict in recovery, has begun openly drinking again.

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