For Elizabeth Gilbert, recovery comes after eat, pray, love

Elizabeth Gilbert rocketed to fame for her best-selling romp “Eat, Pray, Love.” Her latest memoir has a very different tone. “All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation” details her journey to heal from sex and love addiction. It is also about the love of her life, Rayya Elias, a Syrian-born recovering addict and musician. Gilbert joins us for a live broadcast in front of an audience at the Literary Arts bookstore.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller, coming to you today in front of an audience at the Literary Arts bookstore in Southeast Portland. It is an hour with the novelist and memoir writer Elizabeth Gilbert.

[Audience applause]

For years, the bestselling author of “Eat, Pray, Love” was in love with her hairdresser turned best friend named Rayya Elias. But it wasn’t until Rayya was diagnosed with cancer and given six months to live that Gilbert, who was married at the time, confessed her love. A brief, ecstatic period followed and then the bottom fell all the way out. Rayya, who had been in recovery from opioid addiction, relapsed, and Gilbert came eventually to realize that she too was addicted, in her case to sex and love.

Gilbert’s new book is about the devastating loss of Rayya and her own path towards healing. It’s called “All the Way to the River,” and I am thrilled to have Elizabeth Gilbert back on the show. It’s great to have you back on Think Out Loud.

Elizabeth Gilbert: Thanks, Dave. I’m so happy to be here. And it’s wonderful to be here live at Literary Arts. How wonderful.

Miller: I wanna start right in the middle of the book. I don’t normally do this, to start with one of the most dramatic parts of someone’s memoir, but in your case, I don’t know, I sort of feel like I can take these liberties because you’re so open about so much. I want to start with the point that you came up with a plan to murder the love of your life. Can you tell us about sitting on a park bench while you mulled a plan over?

Gilbert: Yeah, so just a tiny bit of context …

Miller: Yeah, yeah. I was assuming you could provide the context. [Laughter]

Gilbert: Like, give me 30 seconds to set it up, Dave, but … [Laughter]

Miller: How monstrous would I be if I said no, no, just the plot.

Gilbert: I just thought it’d be fun to … What was happening at that point was that my partner had terminal pancreatic and liver cancer, and was in fact a hospice patient at that point, but who also, as you mentioned in your introduction, had relapsed into a very severe opioid and cocaine addiction. She had been a heroin and cocaine addict for a lot of her life, had gotten clean, but had relapsed at the end of her life for reasons I suppose we could all understand: the pain and the fear of death. We were sort of in the ninth circle of hell. She was deep into, back into her intravenous drug addiction.

She was not a nice addict. I was at the end of myself, having no idea how to control her or a situation that was daily spiraling out of control even more. We were both sleep deprived and I would say insane, is a really good use of the word. Caregiver fatigue plus dealing with a really angry addict, plus feeling like I had no way out, led me to come up with what felt like, honestly at the time, a really great idea – that maybe I should just hasten her death along, since she was going to be dying anyway. And I sat on a bench in Tompkins Square Park with a bunch of the pills that she was taking for her cancer pain and tried to figure out how many of them I had to give to her so that she would die.

And the reason I write about this so honestly in the book and talk about it so honestly, is because it’s true. Like that’s actually what happened and I don’t think there was a way to tell … But by the way, I didn’t kill her. I didn’t even get as far as trying to before she kind of blew that plan up with her own kind of insight and suspicion that something was going on. But I tell this story because I think withholding that piece of information about myself would have been unethical in the telling of this memoir, and also to show what lengths you can go to in your own insanity when you’re pushed up against the edge of yourself.

Miller: That’s half of this extraordinary part of this big story. The other is her response when you told her, because eventually, after you reconciled with her, you told her about your plan. Can you describe her response to it?

Gilbert: Well, yeah, it’s so Rayya. I mean, I had to put that in the book too because I think very few things can express what she was better than how she responded to that. So the back context of that is that we somehow both individually pulled out of that tailspin. I pulled out by backing, having the courage to walk away from a situation that had become abusive. And she pulled out by somehow finding in herself the resolve to put those drugs down, with no real incentive to. She was dying anyway, but she put it down and found a way to die sober, which was really important to her, for her own spirit.

So we had a tiny little bit of time at the end of her life where we were sort of ourselves again. And at that point, I was like, “hey, I want to tell you about this time where I decided I was going to murder you.” And she was like, “dude, that’s awesome.” [Laughter] Yeah, right? And she’s like, “That’s so badass. How were you gonna do it?” And I told her, “I was gonna cover you with fentanyl patches and then make you take all these pills.” She’s like, “oh my God, that’s amazing.”

And part of the reason she thought it was amazing, what she said to me was, “That’s really cool. You found your darkness.” One of the things that had always attracted us to each other is that she always saw this great, bright light and sort of optimism and fierce, stubborn gladness in me. I always thought she always inhabited sort of like this cool, dark, rock and roll edge that I could never find. And she was like, “see, you have it in you too, you’re a little punk too.” And she was really proud of me.

Miller: When she was proud of you for that, did it change at all the way you thought about your own actions, or planning of an action? Did it make you rethink what you’d thought about the monstrousness of what you had been maybe going to do?

Gilbert: I think in a way, yes. And also, one of the many things that I loved about Rayya was how much capacity she had to hold the reality of everybody’s paradoxes, everybody’s contradictions and everybody’s darkness. She was absolutely unafraid of anybody’s crazy, having lived at such extremes herself as a low bottom drug addict who spent a lot of her life in jails and institutions, and living on the streets. She knew how far we can go from the center of ourselves. She had a lot of empathy for people when they were out of control and that’s why she always felt like such a safe person, like everybody regarded her as a very safe person.

She had absolutely no judgment of anybody, no matter how they were acting out. So to confess something like that to her and have her be like, that’s cool, man, we all want to kill someone eventually … for her to just know that that’s also part of what the human experience can entail, that’s how out of control anybody can get if they’re pushed far enough. And yeah, I think it brought me back to the central thing that I always felt about Rayya, which was, no matter how bad you got, she was never going to throw you away.

Miller: Do you mind reading a portion from a chapter you have early on? The chapter is called “When People Ask Me Who Was Rayya.” You have a whole chapter and in a lot of ways – I mean, we can even just hear it in what you were saying there – answers to that question embedded throughout the book. But here’s a couple of paragraphs, if you don’t mind reading, that gives us and folks who haven’t read the book a little bit more of a sense for who she was.

Gilbert: [Reading excerpt from “All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation”]

“Rayya, whose traditional and hardworking immigrant parents could never make sense of this wild youngest child of theirs, who was utterly ungovernable, who hated to study, hated to work, who was a loving and affectionate child, but also the most disobedient, who was a radiant performer, a clown, a star with a face that was always bathed in light, who never stopped making her parents laugh and never stopped making them cry, who by the age of 13 was already skipping school to drive across state lines with older friends in order to see Led Zeppelin in concert while high on acid, which she was also selling.

“Rayya, who described herself as an ex-junkie, ex-felon, post-punk, glamour butch dyke who was closeted until her early twenties because there was no place for her queerness in the Syrian Orthodox community of 1970s Detroit, where girls did not traditionally leave their parents’ homes until they were successfully married to doctors and lawyers from within the Arab emigre fold, who, growing up, was considered too masculine to be beautiful by the standards of the day, but too female to be offered the freedoms that her brothers and boy cousins enjoyed, who always felt shamed and excluded, who didn’t know what she was till she started seeing people like Elton John, David Bowie and Freddie Mercury on TV and then wanted to become them.

“Rayya, who was gorgeous, who was stunning, who identified as an androgen, who had the dark eyes and dramatic cheekbones of the heroes in Persian illuminated manuscripts, whose haircut was always something between the punked out skater do of a little boy in a Japanese anime adventure and a badass Keith Richards shag, whose face changed from male to female, from wise to playful, from timeless to childish as the light shifted. Rayya, whom I could stare at all day and never get bored.”

Miller: You and Rayya went from hairdresser and client to friends, to inseparable but still platonic companions, to eventually and briefly the loves of each other’s lives. As I noted in my intro, it wasn’t until she was given that diagnosis of about six months to live that you expressed your feelings. What held you back before that?

Gilbert: My very peaceful marriage, my wish to not throw my life into a bonfire again. I’ve blasted my life to smithereens so many times and I was finally, in my opinion and my concept, stable, responsible and trustworthy, and in a very contented marriage with somebody who I loved and respected a great deal. My desire to not want to destroy this beautiful friendship that Rayya and I had.

The three of us in that friendship, love story – my ex-husband, Rayya and myself – all of us knew at a certain extent and a certain level of our consciousness that Liz and Rayya were in love and nobody was going to say anything about it, not even Rayya, who was usually the person who would put something on the table before anyone. But I think in a way, she might have even felt like she had the most to lose. So we all just compartmentalized the hell out of that for many, many years until we were all pushed … this secret thing that nobody was saying but that everybody knew came to light when Rayya was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic and liver cancer, and given six months to live. And that’s gonna change everything in anybody’s life, in anybody’s story.

And I have my ex-husband’s permission to tell this story, so I’ll share it, that when I came to him and told him first that that I was in love with Rayya, and that I needed to go and be with her as her partner before she died, he I was already completely aware of that. He’s like, “Hh honey, I know, I’ve been watching you be in love with her for eight years, but I didn’t want to lose you so I’m glad I didn’t say anything. But you’ve essentially had a husband and a wife for the last eight years, and it’s now time for you to go be with your dying wife.” And [he] very graciously and generously just let go and let me go and do that. So that was the release that was needed for me to be able to go and be with her.

Miller: Can you describe what it felt like, the weeks that followed? The love of your life had just been given six months to live. As we’ll talk about, she ended up greatly exceeding that, but the two of you were finally open about your mutual feelings. What were those first weeks like?

Gilbert: It was the highest high of my entire life, and I was about to say of hers too, but she had other ways of getting very high, so I can’t speak for her. But it was definitely an exceedingly heightened, ecstatic time of great drama, great love, great passion, and all of that was sort of backlit and undergirded by the constant awareness that this was going to be a very short ride. That despite the fact that we’ve been friends for almost 20 years and at one level, knew each other more intimately than we probably knew anybody, this moment, to be able to know each other and be with each other in this different way, was so precious and so extraordinary.

We really took off like a rocket into this heightened stratosphere where we both just dropped any sense of responsibility, any sense of decorum. It was like maybe the freest I’ve ever felt in my entire life. I always say, Rayya was the one who was dying, who’d been given six months to live, but I also was living like somebody who only had six months to live.

So I was like, let’s spend all the money. Let’s go everywhere, let’s do everything. Let’s drink everything. Let’s eat everything. Let’s make all the art we ever wanted to make. We’ll make all the love we ever wanted to make. There was this sense of just absolute wild abandon. And for somebody who has for most of her life loved drama, I mean, it was a ride. It was an incredible experience of freedom and wildness, unlike anything I’ve ever known, and I’ve kind of been chasing that my whole life.

Miller: Do you mind reading us another excerpt?

Gilbert: Sure.

Miller: As always, before I do these interviews, I always talk to an author and say, “hey, this is what I would like you to read.” And you said, “Just give me the book. I’ll read anything.”

Gilbert: I’ll read anything. I don’t care. Although now, I’m gonna ask you … I see that’s the beginning quote.

Miller: Yes.

Gilbert: Oh, I see where it ends. OK, here we go.

Miller: There we are.

Gilbert: [Reading excerpt from “All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation”]

“Still help did arrive in one unexpected way. Spirituality came back into both of our lives during that time. I’d had a random encounter in the hospital one day with a woman whose husband was also dying of pancreatic and liver cancer. When I told this woman that my partner was suffering from the same disease as her husband, she said to me, ‘Do you pray every day? You need to start praying. You won’t be able to survive this experience without prayer.’ There was something about how simply she spoke that, that made her seem like a divine messenger. I felt the truth of her words in my heart, and I believed them completely.

“So I started praying every morning as soon as I woke up, and soon Rayya joined me. Our prayers were simple, but calming. We would take turns talking aloud to God while we held hands under the covers. We didn’t know any formal prayers, so we just asked God for guidance, turning over our fears and our pain to a power greater than ourselves. What I remember most about that ritual was that we each often prayed for the well-being of the other. I never once heard Rayya pray to God to extend her life, but I did hear her say many times, ‘Dear God, please let Liz know how grateful I am for her presence here and that I could not do anything of this without her,’ just as I would often say, ‘Dear God, please give Rayya the strength and courage she needs to get through this day.’

“Those morning prayers are among my most cherished memories of my time with Rayya. More than anything else, I experienced at her side over the years as her friend, and then lover, speaking to God together knitted our hearts into one and brought us into a shared sacred space. And it did something remarkable to my spirit too, fortifying my strength and clarifying the day ahead. Prayer also seemed to calm Rayya’s terror and sorrows, and many times it eased her physical symptoms as well. I’d never before had a partner with whom I could share such holy encounters, and it was beautiful.”

Miller: That’s my guest, Elizabeth Gilbert reading from her new book “All the Way to the River.” What do you mean when you say God?

Gilbert: Well, I’ll start by saying what I don’t mean, because I’m very conscientious when I use that word. And I’m careful to communicate, whenever I can, the respect and love that I have from all of my friends and people I don’t know who are atheist and agnostic – both of which I think are very reasonable responses to life and very reasonable responses certainly to most religious teaching. And I’m also very respectful of my friends and loved ones who are very traditional in their religious beliefs.

The way that I’ve found the simplest way to say it is if you’re an atheist or an agnostic, whatever God you don’t believe in, I also do not believe in that God. And if you’re a person of faith, whatever God you believe in, I also believe in that God. So we’re covered, we’re good, whatever. But what I mean is this great mysterious presence that I feel is very available to me when I drop into silence and stillness, something outside of myself that I believe loves me and wants me to be well. And if I’m quiet enough and still enough, [this presence] will guide me toward a life that doesn’t have to have as much pain and suffering as the first half of my life had. And when I’m in contact with that voice, that mystery, things go well for me, and that’s how I know it wants me well. And when I drop contact with that voice, things go badly not only for me but for anybody in my radius. So, I think it also wants everyone around me to be well too.

Miller: A lot of this book – and we’ll talk more about this as the conversation goes on – is about a fundamental shift in your understanding of your relationships with other human beings. And there are also definitely parts, like the excerpt I just had you read, about spirituality or your relationship to God and prayer. But if it was in here, I missed it … I wasn’t clear if the notion of God that you’ve just been talking about, if that too shifted because of all these other shifts, if being in recovery for sex and love addiction has also just changed your understanding of God.

Gilbert: Yeah, it’s shifted and not just being in recovery for sex and love addiction, but being in 12-step recovery rooms for general codependency that I’ve exhibited my entire life has shifted my relationship with everybody. Like with every entity alive and dead, including my higher power. One of the things that it’s done is it’s shifted a lot of the need and the neediness that I’ve exhibited my entire life for what we call in the rooms of recovery, LAVA. That stands for love, attention, validation and approval.

So my desperate need for LAVA and my efforts to morph into whatever I needed to be or control you in any way I could, to extract that from you, you meaning anyone … a lot of what’s happened in recovery is that I’ve pulled, dialed that back. And instead of seeking that from humans, I’m seeking that from that infinitely loving, ever present, divine source that actually has the amount of it that I need. And the amount of it that I need is infinite and no human can do that, right? Infinite need cannot be filled by a finite source, that’s the definition of addiction. So all addicts operate from a place of infinite need that they’re trying to fill with whatever finite source they’re using, whether it’s drugs, or alcohol, or cigarettes, or food, or shopping, or gambling, or gaming, or workaholism. Whatever the thing is that you’re pouring into what we call the God-sized hole, it doesn’t work.

I’ve always felt I’ve always had the God gene, even though I didn’t grow up in a religious family, or maybe because I didn’t, I was able to find that within my own consciousness. The way I always express it is that I always felt God. I always believed in God. I always loved God, but it wasn’t until coming into recovery that I had to learn how to trust God. And that’s a very different thing, turning my will and my life over to the care of a power greater than myself and actually giving that power, giving over control, or as we express it more accurately, giving over the illusion of control that I had never had …

Miller: Because you never had it to begin with.

Gilbert: I never had it anyway, right? So when you give up control, you’re giving up something you never had anyway. So giving up control over other people is just giving up an illusion that you could ever control them in the first place.

Miller: Let’s take a question from our audience. Go ahead.

Audience Member: Hi, I’m Jan. I just finished your book at 9:30 this morning. And when I got done I thought of two things. One, you were writing the book and you had a hope or a goal in mind. Now that you’ve finished it and you’re out, you’re traveling, and you’re interviewing people and they’re interviewing you, has that goal shifted, expanded or changed?

Gilbert: Thank you. Thanks for your question, Jan. I appreciate that.

My goal in the writing of the book was to figure out, first of all, whether I could even describe Rayya. I know that the New Yorker magazine many years ago had an editor who famously had a rule that you were never allowed to use the word “indescribable.” If you were a New Yorker writer, his response was, go get another job if you can’t describe something. It’s your one job, like your one job as a writer is to describe things. But Rayya is the closest person I’ve ever met to somebody who was indescribable, because her swings of paradox were so huge and I was like, can I get this over the net? When somebody reads this book, will they feel like they knew who this person was and will I be able to do justice as a storyteller to her being, can I describe the story?

The second goal that I had was, can I understand what happened? The effort was forensic because the turn that this story took when Rayya – when both of us relapsed is how I say it now – returned to the most degraded version of herself, as a really abusive drug addict, and I returned to the most degraded version of myself, which was a spineless codependent enabler, that story that we fell into was so dark that it left me feeling concussed for a long while after. I couldn’t have written this book right after Rayya died because I quite literally did not understand what had happened to me, is what it felt like, right?

My lack of understanding about my own psychopathology, and my own codependency, and sex and love addiction was like, I was just standing there and this terrible thing happened to me. And that is in fact not how I see it now, but the writing of the book was like a real forensic beat-by-beat effort to figure out, how did we get there and then how do you get out of that once you’ve gone to such a dark place? Now that I’m out talking about the book’s goals, I think my goal is deeply clear, transparent honesty in every single conversation that I have about this book, whether it’s a public conversation like we’re having right now or a private conversation.

The only help I think I can offer and service that I can offer is always to be as transparently honest as possible, otherwise what are we even doing here? And I’ve been seeing some people – not all people, I don’t think everyone will find themselves in these pages – have been reporting that they’re recognizing aspects of their own mind that they maybe wouldn’t have seen without reading the book. So yeah, just telling the truth and telling it wherever.

Miller: You mentioned private conversations and public conversations. Obviously, this is a very public one on statewide radio. How different are they at this point? If radical honesty is the ultimate goal for you at this point, how big a difference is there between the public and the private?

Gilbert: None really. I mean, no, that’s not true. The only thing that I’ll do that’s boundaried in public conversation is what I did in the book as well. If I’m not talking about me and Rayya, I’m very careful and you’ll notice in the book I was very careful talking about my ex-husband. I was careful talking about other people, other relationships.

Miller: I mean, for example, you said more about your ex-husband’s response to you saying that you were in love with Rayya in this interview, than you do anywhere in the book.

Gilbert: Yeah.

Miller: So that that came, for example, after.

Gilbert: Yeah, and I’m just careful. I’m just careful to try to not expose anybody who I don’t have permission to expose.

Miller: But for yourself.

Gilbert: There’s no reason to.

Miller: There’s no difference.

Gilbert: There’s no reason to be careful and it actually makes life way easier. So that’s why, when you came up and we spoke earlier, I was like, yeah, ask whatever you want to ask, we’ll talk about whatever you want to talk about. The only place I’ll ever draw a line is if it involves somebody other than me and Rayya, and that actually makes life, I think, in general, really easy. So there might be some things that I would say privately about other people who were tangential to the story or who are part of the story, but I wouldn’t say them publicly.

Miller: Let’s take another question from our audience. Go ahead.

Audience Member: Hi, my name is Heidi. You called yourself the nice lady who wrote “Eat, Pray, Love,” and I’m wondering if it feels really liberating now to have this out there and not just be that. And then also I’m wondering if back then when that book came out if there was any frustration of, well, I do have darkness and there is more to me than that this whole time?

Gilbert: Yeah, thank you. I feel like when I look at “Eat, Pray, Love,” the way I see it now is that I think that’s everything I knew when I was 34. And if you might remember – I don’t want to assume anybody’s age – you knew slightly less when you were 34 than maybe you do when you’re 56. So that’s where I am now. I have this great benefit over that 34-year-old of 22 additional years of Earth school. And I imagine that when I look back at this book when I’m in my seventies, I might be like, oh, that’s so cute, she thought she understood so many things. There was so much more to understand and to learn.

So I never felt like I never felt like I was withholding. I feel like “Eat, Pray, Love” was as transparent as it could be. It contained everything that I knew about the world at that time and everything that I knew about myself at that time, so I didn’t feel like there was a persona being presented. It was odd, after the book was published, when people came to see me as somebody who had answers for their lives – that felt really confusing for a while because I was like, “y’all, I’m barely figuring this out myself here.” But I think …

Miller: But did it feel good?

Gilbert: No, not at first.

Miller: It was alienating.

Gilbert: Yeah, it was strange. It felt strange because, like I said, I felt like Bambi on ice. I have felt like Bambi on ice so much of my life. I’m barely figuring out how to survive this day. But what I think, how I came to see that was that what was actually growing up was a sort of, I don’t know, like a sisterhood mostly, because it was mostly women who responded to that book. But it was more like a fellowship of shared recognition where a lot of women, what they were saying was, I identify very much with the feelings that you’re sharing and that you’re talking about.

And when I came to see it more as, we’re all doing this, that felt more comfortable to me than Liz Gilbert has answers for my life, when she scarcely had answers for her own. But yeah, I just think this is, in a way, an extension of that, but the only difference is I know more now and I’ve found out more now about why I have acted the way that I’ve acted at various times.

Miller: Let’s take another question. Go ahead.

Audience member: Hi. I love your lack of hair.

Gilbert: Thank you.

Audience member: It’s lovely and I wondered if the fact that the woman about whom you wrote and whom you’re talking [who] was your hairdresser has anything to do with the fact that you have little hair now?

Gilbert: Yes, thank you, and this is a radio format. So for those of you at home, I have a completely buzzed head, sort of early-days Sinead O’Connor look that I’ve had for the last two years. And yes, that’s a really good point. I met Rayya when she was my hairdresser. You wouldn’t know it now to look at me, but I have very difficult hair that I’ve been in a battle with my entire life and I gave up the battle a couple years ago. I don’t know who won the battle, but the battle is over. And Rayya was one of the few people in the world and one of the reasons we became so close … She was one of the few people in the world who could ever figure out what to do with my hair and she always managed to make it look really good.

I remember I actually had a desire right after she died to shave it because part of the grieving was like I don’t … she’s been giving me haircuts for 20 years, like nobody else understands me and nobody else understands my hair. And I remember actually taking her clippers, looking in the mirror and thinking, I’m just gonna do it. I’m just gonna buzz this off and I heard her voice very clearly say, “ew, baby, no.” [Laughs] Rayya liked women who were very feminine and she still doesn’t like this, wherever she is in the universe. But I like it.

I think it also signifies a sort of surrender into just an honest … I think the fact that I don’t wear makeup anymore and I don’t do anything to my face, [and] I’m just letting my face slide right off itself as I’m getting older, and that I don’t have any hair, all of this is sort of about this great, liberating feeling of just being absolutely transparent and readable, of being like, well, this is the age that we are here, folks.

And I remember also, one of the things that that gave me the courage to finally buzz the hair was spending a week with a woman in her eighties who’s a great spiritual teacher of mine, and just being around her luminescence, and – there’s no other word for it – beautiful luminescence, and her tremendously lined face, and her white hair, and just thinking, what are we pretending is happening here? Why are we pretending that we’re not getting older? Why am I pretending I’m blonde? It reminds me, Dolly Parton had a great line where somebody asked her one time, “do you ever get offended by dumb blonde jokes?” And she said, “oh no, honey, because I know I ain’t dumb and I know I ain’t blonde.” [Laughter] Like, why am I pretending I’m blonde, why am I pretending I’m not aging?

So even that feels like a kind of deeper level of spiritual honesty and I just love … My preparation for going on stage is just to go on stage now. My preparation for going on TV is like, “well, here I am on TV, you’re all just going to have to deal with what I look like.” And that feels really liberating and joyful to me in a great way. Thank you.

Miller: After you and Rayya hit bottom, and you mentioned this briefly, there was an extraordinary reconciliation that very well couldn’t have happened, but she got help from an old friend back in Michigan and eventually the two of you did reconnect. What did you learn about forgiveness from that, both how to forgive and how to be forgiven?

Gilbert: It’s such a great question. I learned so much about forgiveness from Rayya [during] my whole life with her, because she had this real infinite capacity to forgive people that I have struggled with. I’m much more of a perfectionist about my own behavior and also about the behavior of others. I set really impossible standards for myself and I also set really impossible standards for you, and she didn’t do either of those things. That made her, I think in many ways, a safer person for people to be around.

But the word I actually got from Rayya and that I prefer to forgiveness, just for myself, is mercy. And mercy is a word that’s in very short supply in our world these days. Almost everyone I think is much happier getting high on outrage, on moral outrage than on some sort of sense of mercy. I think it’s also true that self hatred comes from an absence of mercy.

The way I understand, have come to understand mercy, is forgiveness can seem patronizing sometimes. It can seem like you don’t really deserve this, but I’m gonna give it to you because I’m better than you. It’s often how I experience being forgiven or offering forgiveness. There can be a hierarchical, sort of moral sense in there that doesn’t quite always feel good. Mercy, on the other hand, is a spirit that Rayya was very good at, which was, hey, listen, here we are sitting in our shared humanity together. Like here we are sitting in what the great spiritual teacher Ram Dass called our shared human dilemma.

And here I am sitting in my my human dilemma and here you are sitting in your human dilemma, and I don’t really know how to do things always and you don’t really know how to do things always, so why don’t we just drop this judgment that we’re holding each other, and just be in our shared humanity together with unguarded hearts and a kind of great cosmic shrug of like, “yeah, we’re all a mess, here we are and let’s be kind to each other.” So I think where we got to, at the end of her life and my life, was a shared mercy.

Miller: Let’s take another question. Go ahead.

Audience Member: Hi Liz, I’m Emma.

Gilbert: Hi Emma.

Audience Member: I’m 34 now, myself. And “Eat, Pray, Love” was a very important book for me in my teens and twenties. I’m curious now, with those additional years of life and learning, if you could go back and say anything or give anything to that version of you, what might that be?

Gilbert: Oh, happy 34. There’s one part of “Eat, Pray, Love” … First of all, I would change the subtitle of “Eat, Pray, Love” from “One Woman’s Search for Everything across Italy, India and Indonesia.” I would change that to “Good Guess,” [Laughter] because I do feel like that whole book was such a good guess. And the guess that the younger me had was, I’m in infinite despair and confusion, but if I go out there in the world with my big appetites and I fill myself with every single thing the world has to offer, then maybe I’ll feel better, and it worked till it didn’t. So I think a lot of that book was about pulling in everything that the world could give to my appetites, like food, travel, sex and love, all this stuff.

And maybe that’s also how it should be, at that age. But what I would want her to know – there’s this one moment in “Eat, Pray, Love” that breaks my heart and it’s at the end of the Italy section. I say this buckwild, weird thing to the reader that’s like, “I know I can’t live like this forever,” meaning following my curiosity, my bliss, my joy and my passions. And I make this weird promise to this invisible reader that I’m like, “I promise that when I’m done with this trip that I’ll go be a respectable person again.” And I did indeed do that, in terms of what I had been taught respectability looked like. I got married to a man. I became a good wife. I became a good stepmother. I became a good member of the community. I worked really hard to be respectable. And I would have liked to have told her not to do that. I would have liked to have said, actually what you’re doing, the way you’re living right now, not necessarily in terms of the appetites, but in terms of the freedom, don’t give it away. Don’t give it away.

Keep going. Don’t get zipped up. Don’t get zipped back into some sort of a costume of a good woman. And that I wish I could have let her know. But if that had been the case, then my life would not have played out in all the ways that it did and none of us would be here. So basically what I would say to her honestly is just like do what you’re going to do anyway. Which is kind of what I think maybe the kindest thing we could say to anyone. Like, why don’t you just go ahead and do what you’re going to do anyway, and I’ll meet you at the end of it and then we’ll laugh. [Laughter]

Miller: I’m fascinated by the first part there, that you wish you could change the subtitle to “Good Guess.” Could that be the subtitle for this book as well? I mean, do you feel like that you don’t need that kind of hedging, framing or sort of temporary enlightenment framing, or you should [it] always be “Good Guess.”

Gilbert: I think “Good Guess” would be that I give you permission to put that on my gravestone. When we all meet in whatever afterworld, I think we’re all just going to be slapping each other on the back and be like, “good guess!” It’s like, good guess for how you lived. And I think it’s going back to the concept of mercy. I think it’s maybe the most merciful way to see what anyone is doing, recognizing that certainly there’s a lot of truth in the Buddhist precept that the only thing anybody is ever doing is, well, they’re trying to just survive themselves, their own minds and their own days.

The only reason anybody ever does anything is because they think it’s a good idea. If you’re looking around and seeing insanity, what looks to you like insanity, a kinder way to see that might be “good guess,” that what someone is doing is what they think is going to make them happy. That’s all anyone is doing or what they think is the best option for survival. And I love that George Saunders, when he sees people acting out in ways that look crazy or disruptive, he says, “that’s me on a different day.”

So yeah, I think maybe “Good Guess” could be the title of all my books and all my actions. That’s why it’s really good not to be too cruel when you look back at yourself for things that you did that you wouldn’t do now. Just because I wouldn’t do something again doesn’t mean that I did something wrong. It just means that I took a really good guess. When people look at younger versions of themselves and they’re like, “what was I thinking,” that’s actually one of the rare, big, cosmic questions that you can answer. You just have to go back and ask that younger version of yourself, what were you thinking? And typically they were thinking, this is going to be security for me, or this might work out for me, or I think this is going to be good. I think this is gonna go really well or this is the only option I feel I have right now. And all of those things just deserve our approval. Sitting here in the privileged position of the present moment looking back at the past, it’s like, “Yeah, good guess, honey. It’s OK, little friend.” That’s all you need to do.

Miller: Let’s take another question.

Audience Member: Hi Liz, I’m Indra, and I want to thank you for the experience of this book. Dare I say I was quite addicted to your words and thoughts. And you touched on it for just a minute earlier, the concept of Earth school, and I just wanted to see if you could share that with the group here. It reminded me so much of the concepts within “ Many Live, Many Masters” by Brian Weiss. And I just want to say I’m a partner with you in that concept of Earth school. It’s a great perspective.

Gilbert: Thank you. It’s, again, starting with the humble stance that we can’t really know how everything works, the concept that this planet is a school, a school for souls, or as I like to think of it, the most challenging accredited soul advancement university available in the cosmos. And this idea … I mean, I didn’t make up this idea. It shows up in lots of different cultures and in lots of different religious traditions, especially in the East, where there’s I think a greater sense of awareness of this idea. But I love this idea that our spirits chose to come here, take form and to be embodied because there were certain experiences that could only be had in that way. And through those experiences there were certain lessons that could not be learned any other way. And that those lessons give us these opportunities to advance, not necessarily to advance in our worldly power but to advance in our wisdom.

There’s a line I quote in the book that Mark Twain said: “The man who picks up a cat by the tail learns something he could not learn any other way.” And some of us have had to pick up a lot of cats by a lot of tails before we get it. There’s certain lessons that [will] just keep cycling back until we graduate from that particular thing that we don’t have to do anymore. It’s like, I’m hoping maybe I’m done with this. I’ve repeated third grade nine times now. I’m hoping that maybe I’m done with this pattern and that I can evolve. Certainly, something very exciting and unusual is happening on this planet, because as hard as everyone has been looking, we haven’t been able to find anything that looks like this or that looks like us anywhere in the cosmos. And maybe that is indeed what happens, we come here.

I also think it’s very interesting that if you talk to any parent about their child, they will say that the kid showed up that way, like 100%. They’re like, “he was like this from the minute he was born,” “this is just how she is.” We seem to come with this sort of imprinted identity and character that’s already in place that I think can certainly be destroyed by trauma. But really our essential nature, I think, doesn’t really change. We are who we are, and then we’re here to grow and to learn.

The nice thing about the Earth school concept is when I’m in a situation that I don’t like, it becomes a kind of interesting spiritual and mental game to be like, why might I have designed the video game this way? If I am indeed here to grow, what is the lesson in here that I couldn’t get any other way and how quickly can we get to that? Thank you.

Miller: I think we have time for one more question from the audience. Go ahead.

Audience member: Hi, this is a bit of a continuation on what you were just talking about, but you mentioned throwing yourself on the bonfire over and over again. As such a gifted and celebrated storyteller, I wonder how much consciousness you have when you are walking through the bonfire about, man, this is gonna make a great story, a great book someday? And if there is that consciousness there, even a little bit of it, does that give you courage to walk a little wilder in that story?

Gilbert: Oh, that’s such a great question. It’s funny because it’s sort of typically the opposite. Like when I was sobbing and suicidal on the bathroom floor in my early thirties, in the story that became “Eat, Pray, Love,” there was no part of me that was like, “this is going to be a great story and Julia Roberts is gonna love to do this scene someday.” [Laughter] All I was in was the trauma and I think the definition of trauma responses is you can’t get an outside perspective. When you’re in terrible trauma, terrible loss and terrible fear, you can’t back up from that to regard yourself in any way. You’re just completely sucked into the vortex of that pain.

And usually the things that I have ended up writing memoirs about have typically been things I wanted to hide from the world, right? Like, I don’t want anybody to know this about me. I’m out there fronting and presenting, before “Eat, Pray, Love,” that this marriage was doing great, and that I was doing great, and that buying this house was a good idea, and that I was excited about maybe being a mother someday. I had all sorts of personas that were out there in the world and the last thing I wanted anybody to know was what was happening on that bathroom floor every night, where I was sobbing and misery and pain. So, quite the opposite, I would say.

And even with Rayya, at the very beginning of when we came together, we both wanted me to write a book about our love story and about her. And we talked about what the title of it would be and I was writing notes the entire time. I was also trying to kind of download her, keep her in story and remember everything that we were going through because it was so incredible and so heightened. But when we took a dark turn, once again, I was like, “no one must ever know this,” no one must ever know that this great love story is a nightmare. I have to make sure that this absolutely is hidden and I will not be writing a book about this.

So coming back around to seven years later, being like, oh no, this is exactly the story that you need to tell and you need to tell the part that you don’t want anybody to know, because that’s your job. So yeah, maybe I should catch on sooner that this is going to be a great tale. [Laughs]

Miller: Going back to where we started and your different relationship to LAVA – love, acceptance …

Gilbert: Love, acceptance, validation and approval.

Miller: Has your different awareness of that, your relationship to that, what you used to desperately need from people, in terms of the work you put out into the world and the response you get to the work, from critics or from readers – has it changed that?

Gilbert: Yeah, it has. And it’s changed my relationship with a lot of things. Now, I’m a recovering love addict, right? I’m not a recovered love addict. As they say about drug addiction recovery, today you’re drug free, but you’re not drug proof. I have to go up against this desire, this need to be loved by everybody, every day. I’m recovering from that, taking contrary action and doing things that don’t throw me into that.

So one of the things is social media is a really dangerous place for somebody like me to be, because checking to see how many “likes” you have, checking to see who “liked” the post that you did … Am I approved of, am I loved, am I validated? Am I as validated as the post I put up yesterday? It’s such a dangerous ground for somebody like me. And that’s why, a couple of years ago, knowing that I needed to be on social media in order to be a good partner to my publishers when I’ve got books coming out and things to promote, I hired your old friend and mine, my best friend Margaret, to read. I don’t look at what’s there, because that’s not a safe place for me and I …

Miller: You don’t have to rely on the dopamine hits or boosts.

Gilbert: That’s not a good place for me. And also, when this book came out, I let my publishers and my editors know … I was like, “Don’t send me any responses. I don’t want to know. I don’t even want to read the good reviews.” And things drip in and I hear about things, but for the most part, I try to remain really boundaried because I can’t make The Wall Street Journal’s opinion of me into my higher power. And if I start reading that review, I will have a response to it that will be like my life depends on what they think of me – and it doesn’t.

Miller: Elizabeth Gilbert, thank you very much.

Gilbert: Thank you so much. Wonderful to be with you.

Miller: Thanks also to our amazing audience here. Elizabeth Gilbert’s latest book is called “All the Way to the River.”

“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every weekday and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.

If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.