I was totally on the Eat, Pray, Love bandwagon. Not going to lie. It's one of those books that I re-read at different times in my life in order to learn something (along with Handmaid's Tale, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Wild by Cheryl Strayed). I was curious to see what this book could teach me, if anything. And what I learned is that I'm very much like Elizabeth Gilbert in many ways, although I haven't ever had to go through what she had to go through to write this book.
This is a memoir and it is about Gilbert's relationship with Rayya Elias - who Gilbert met, incidentally, because she was Gilbert's hairdresser (yup!), then her closest most bestest friend for many years, and finally her lover/partner until Rayya died from cancer. This includes, BTW, the time that Gilbert was married to her husband from Eat, Pray, Love and Committed era. When Rayya got sick, it seemed that Gilbert figured out that the relationship was romantic, intimate, and sexual (even though she'd been working for years to deny it). Gilbert then left her husband and moved to be with Rayya in order to care for her during her last few months (in a house that Gilbert bought for her essentially). This plan went majorly off the rails when not only did Rayya live longer than the doctors predicted but slid back into a full blown addiction in the last months of her life. She was addicted to heroin, alcohol, you name it and Gilbert was there to not only witness it but to experience the effects of those addictions on their relationship. When I say things got ugly, I'm not really doing it justice because they were U-G-L-Y without any alibi in sight anywhere. It got so bad that Gilbert contemplated killing Rayya and making it look like an accident.
The story is very well told. Gilbert is a good author if nothing else. It's a love story, a story of passion and obsession, a story about codependency and love addiction, a story about an addict relapsing, a story about grief, a story about confronting the darkest side of your own nature when your life spins out of control. Rayya is brought vividly to life in technicolor. Having said that, I've come to view Gilbert with a tad sense of skepticism and caution: trust but verify. I simply can't help but believe that this woman would write anything that she thinks would sell. And maybe this was her complete rock-bottom moment - when her grand passion and co dependency for Rayya led her down so many dark paths that she thought that she would actually kill her. What I didn't need, was the self helpy, preachy part because guess what? She's been peddling this stuff for YEARS. I loved the gritty memoir. I loved reading about what happened with her and Rayya and the ups and downs and her experiences but I could do without the preachiness from someone that, in my humble opinion, hasn't learned from any of the other experiences that she has had and written about. It also felt really icky and exploitative. Of Rayya and her last days.
::shrugs:: would I recommend it? Yes, but go in forewarned and don't be afraid to chuck it if it gets to be too much for you.
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