Like almost everyone else I know, I loved Liz Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love. I read it right after I blew up my own life by quitting my stable job as a doctor to pursue an unknown life of God knows what, and I wanted to be Liz Gilbert.
I hadn’t published any books of my own yet, although I dreamed of doing so. Like Liz, I’d gone through a divorce that was my own choice. I’d been to Italy but not India or Bali, and I longed for more adventure than an OB/GYN doctor’s life of hospital commitments would allow me. I was a little full of myself and lacking in humility after martyring myself for twenty years of medical training and practice and then deciding I deserved a more fulfilling life after losing my physician father far too young. But it would be years before I would spot the red flags of young Liz’s narcissistic tendencies, born out of a reactionary rebellion against her codependent tendencies, something I could indeed resonate with in myself.
I went to an Eat, Pray, Love book event in San Francisco, just so I could bask in Liz’s glow, and I was shocked when she got on stage and said something to tune of “What are you all doing, going to Italy, India, and Bali and trying to recreate my Eat, Pray, Love experience? Why don’t you go on your own pilgrimage and find your own story, rather than copying everything I’ve done? Unless you want to join the Liz Gilbert cult, in which case there will be an offering plate at the back of the room and you’re welcome to give me all of your money.”
I felt like I’d been slapped. Here I was, unemployed and scraping by on $200,000 of debt I was floating while trying to figure out how to earn a living next, and I’d just spent a lot of money to be there, and now I was getting accused of being a cult junkie? It all felt really weird and soured me on Liz Gilbert as an actual person. But because she’s such a wonderful writer, I still read all the books she put out since then, including her latest.
Just now, I finished reading Liz’s new memoir All The Way To The River, and what I missed before is staring at me baldy from between these pages. This is where unbridled codependency and an uncontained obsession with other people meets unearned privilege, love addiction, and madness.
Spoiler alert. If you haven’t read the book and you want to be surprised, stop now because I’m going to give you a summary. The Liz at the beginning of the book is married to the Brazilian man she met in Bali during the Eat, Pray, Love years when finds out that her best friend Rayya, who she’s been secretly harboring a crush on for many years, has a terminal cancer diagnosis. She confesses her undying love to her husband, divorces him, and hooks up with Rayya, which I remember Liz announcing years ago on social media.
“Rayya experienced an “unrestrained ecstasy” at the clarity and simplicity of her terminal diagnosis, telling Liz: “Let’s just blaze out … let’s just live balls to the wall until I die!”
So they do, hurtling into unbridled codependency and love and sex addiction for Liz and unrestrained drug addiction for Rayya, the details of which are not spared, crescendoing into the moment when Liz decides she’s going to murder Rayya, not as a mercy killing or to help her die with dignity, but as a cold-blooded murder to put Liz out of her own misery because Rayya has cut her off from the drug of her choice- Rayya’s adoration, validation, affection, touch, sex, and all the juicy yum goodness of euphoric romantic fantasy.
Vulnerable Disclosure Or Overdisclosure?
I couldn’t help wondering “Is this brave, vulnerable disclosure?” as Oprah suggested in her glowing Oprah’s Book Club interview with Liz Gilbert. Or was this overdisclosure and boundary violating TMI?
We just did a whole session in The Writer’s Calling, answering this provocative question regarding our own writing. Where is that edge of riveting transparency that we all love in memoirs- and when does it become sensationism, trauma porn, and boundaryless overexposure? Especially when we’re talking about someone else’s addiction, where is that edge? Who owns our story when it includes other people? How much transparency is good writing versus when is it what Brené Brown calls “floodlighting?” When are we going “one up” by telling about someone else’s bad choices, and when are we just being honest and transparent?
If you’re writing to heal or to publish and you’d like to watch this week’s The Writer’s Calling recording, you can get access to it here.
I Felt Like A Voyeur
What’s my two cents? Honestly, I felt voyeuristic reading it, like I couldn’t put it down but I felt guilty every time I picked it up, like I was violating Liz’s (and Rayya’s) boundaries without wanting to. But then, when I’m invited to do so- is it still a boundary violation? It was very confusing for my parts. I had a strong mother hen part that wanted to protect Liz, to put some skin on her and keep her warm and safe. I worry that she will regret publishing this some day, and then it will be too late. But maybe I’m just waaaay overprotective of someone I have only ever met once. Maybe she needed the money after all she went through. Who am I to judge?
Many times during the book, I felt uncomfortable being let in so close to two women’s very private struggles. I felt like I was reading Liz’s journal, something that she should absolutely write- for herself, but which might be too private to splay all over the internet, especially when it contained so much personal detail about someone who is now dead. Especially because it included little doodle drawings and very personal poems, it felt designed to let us peek inside her journal, rather than curating the experience for the reader so it felt like a book about us, the readers, rather than like Liz was expecting us to be narcissistic supply for her vanity publication. I felt like I had just paid full price to read a book that wasn’t really written for me, the reader, but maybe more for Liz’s healing process.
I’m a big fan of writing memoirs we never need to (or should) publish. Thank God my first memoir never got published, even though, God knows I tried! I look back now and think how embarrassed I would be if that rant against the medical industrial complex- and my own feelings of victimhood- had been published in its unrestrained voice. I now see that I needed to write it, to get that rage out of my system so I could teach doctors and those we treat. But nobody else ever needs to read that book.
Did She Have Consent?
I wondered as I was reading if Liz had permission to tell the very private- and not at all flattering- story of a dead woman and was disturbed when, on the Oprah Book Club interview, she reveals that Rayya came to her five years after her death to tell Liz that she had to write this book.
Really? Are we sure? Did Rayya’s spirit really come to Liz and give her permission to share the worst moments of Rayya’s unimaginably horrific end of life addiction spiral with millions of people? Or is that Liz’s magical thinking mixed in with a little delusion, justifying what maybe she knew was too private to disclose without someone’s expressed consent- but she wanted to publish it anyway?
I’ve had feelings like this while reading memoirs before. When Glennon Doyle published her book Love Warrior about her husband’s sex addiction and the toll it had taken on their marriage, I was shocked at the level of detail she revealed. I’d known these things already. Glennon had told me, privately, in emails, when we were talking woman to woman about the endings of our marriages.
But when I read the beautifully written book, I couldn’t help thinking, “What will her children think when they grow up and read about their father? How will he ever find another date, now that his very private struggle is well known to millions of people?” It made me careful with what I’ve disclosed about my own life and relationships and led me to do many therapy sessions around boundaries for writers like me. I’m sure I still get it wrong, but for 15 years, I’ve always asked for the consent of anyone you’ve read about here on this blog, including my mother, who gave me permission to write anything I wanted about her after her death- if I thought it might help me or anyone else heal. I imagine I will still look back when I’m older and wiser and think “What were you thinking? Really?” But I do try to at least consider how what I write will impact the people who might read it.
“Priv Lit”
The other discomfort I kept noticing impacted my social justice parts. I had the cringey feeling I get when I’m reading the kind of chick lit that exposes unearned privilege without naming it or owning it. I’m sure I’ve been guilty of it myself but it helped to put language to it. I’ve heard it called “priv lit,” a term coined by journalist Jennifer Niesslein and popularized by writer Astra Taylor and Jennifer Schaffer, but most notably analyzed in a 2010 essay by Jessica Knoll and Jennifer Baumgardner in the now defunct Bitch Magazine titled Eat, Pray, Spend. Priv-lit...