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juushikaTitle: All the Way to the River
Author: Elizabeth Gilbert
Published: Riverhead Books, 2025
Rating: 1 of 5
Page Count: 400
Total Page Count: 552,900
Text Number: 2072
Read Because: Tumblr made me do it, ebook borrowed from Multnomah County Library
Review: A memoir from the Eat, Pray, Love lady, detailing her romantic relationship with Rayya Elias during the course of Elias's terminal illness, and a subsequent recovery from love and sex addiction. I came in search of a hot mess; this sure is a hot mess, but not of the unputdownable variety. Gilbert is insufferable, a kind of relaxed and talky that reads as glib and unedited rather than confessional, interspersed with the most clumsy, naïve poetry I've ever pushed through.
So, she's annoying. But is she bad? Is this an authentic memoir? Does it have value? I'm not particularly interested in the simplifying effect of culpability, and hinging condemnation on the homicidal ideation is ridiculous. But this is a memoir that centers another person, and Gilbert is willing to overshare when it concerns Elias, but obtrusively circumspect when it comes to equally salient figures/events. Elias has living relatives, and so the claim towards respecting the privacy of third parties doesn't hold water; rather, the selective telling feels incomplete and dishonest. And I'll admit a personal aversion to AA/twelve-step program frameworks, but this selective transparency combined with the surrender of the self to a higher power and the offensively clumsy justifications of suffering ("What if everything (and everyone) that we label as 'difficult' or 'an obstacle' or even 'dysfunctional' is in fact a deliberately designed construct meant to awaken us to our true natures[...]?") cumulatively feels shallow and self-serving. Gilbert's self-criticisms fail to negate this fundamental flaw. No, this isn't a memoir of value, even if the value is hate-reading.
Author: Elizabeth Gilbert
Published: Riverhead Books, 2025
Rating: 1 of 5
Page Count: 400
Total Page Count: 552,900
Text Number: 2072
Read Because: Tumblr made me do it, ebook borrowed from Multnomah County Library
Review: A memoir from the Eat, Pray, Love lady, detailing her romantic relationship with Rayya Elias during the course of Elias's terminal illness, and a subsequent recovery from love and sex addiction. I came in search of a hot mess; this sure is a hot mess, but not of the unputdownable variety. Gilbert is insufferable, a kind of relaxed and talky that reads as glib and unedited rather than confessional, interspersed with the most clumsy, naïve poetry I've ever pushed through.
So, she's annoying. But is she bad? Is this an authentic memoir? Does it have value? I'm not particularly interested in the simplifying effect of culpability, and hinging condemnation on the homicidal ideation is ridiculous. But this is a memoir that centers another person, and Gilbert is willing to overshare when it concerns Elias, but obtrusively circumspect when it comes to equally salient figures/events. Elias has living relatives, and so the claim towards respecting the privacy of third parties doesn't hold water; rather, the selective telling feels incomplete and dishonest. And I'll admit a personal aversion to AA/twelve-step program frameworks, but this selective transparency combined with the surrender of the self to a higher power and the offensively clumsy justifications of suffering ("What if everything (and everyone) that we label as 'difficult' or 'an obstacle' or even 'dysfunctional' is in fact a deliberately designed construct meant to awaken us to our true natures[...]?") cumulatively feels shallow and self-serving. Gilbert's self-criticisms fail to negate this fundamental flaw. No, this isn't a memoir of value, even if the value is hate-reading.
