"Addiction. A disease so insidious and vile that — I swear to God — it makes terminal cancer look like a day at the beach." ~Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the RiverChronicling her year-long, post-divorce journey around the world, Elizabeth Gilbert became a cultural phenomenon and, dare I say, the original wellness influencer back in 2006?Eat, Pray, Love sat on The New York Times Best Seller List for 187 weeks, sold 18 million copies, and was adapted into a feature film starring Julia Rob...

I'm going to write a longer, prettier review one of these days… but I need to comment on how shook I am by all the judgmental reviews. I'm feeling impassioned! This book, All the Way to the River, is written by an addict. Let me repeat: All the Way to the River is written by an addict. The negative comments seem like they're coming from people who have most likely never stepped foot in the sacred rooms of recovery that Elizabeth Gilbert speaks of. She is telling the truth of her life, owning it,...

This book isn't a river—it’s a whirlpool. A slow, spiraling descent into the kind of spiritual navel-gazing that mistakes self-revelation for self-justification. In *All the Way to the River*, Elizabeth Gilbert trades her once-celebrated clarity and candor for a narrative so murky, it’s hard to tell if even she knows where she’s going. What begins with the promise of emotional honesty curdles into a strangely performative account of a relationship that, by her own telling, careened through obse...

I usually don't rate or review books I didn't finish, but I made it to page 316 of Elizabeth Gilbert's *All the Way to the River*, where she claims to have interviewed the cancer cells of her deceased partner, so I feel like I've earned the right to. Honestly, this book review basically writes itself.

I'm genuinely stunned that I'm even writing this, but Elizabeth Gilbert admits to trying to murder her girlfriend and is now using that as a plot point to profit from in "All the Way to the River." Seriously?She knowingly contributed to getting a recovering addict back on drugs, then *tries* to kill her because she didn’t like the outcome and was impatient because her terminal cancer wasn’t killing her fast enough. Then, she abandoned her, despite being her caregiver, and had the *audacity* to u...

I've edited this to add that the author is catching flak for this book, but *All the Way to the River* needs to be read through the eyes of an addict. I don’t know a single addict (and I know a few) who isn’t a complete asshole when they’re in the throes of addiction. Elizabeth Gilbert is either still in her addiction while writing this, or she’s taking us right back to those days. There's no real way to tell unless you're within her boundaries. If you aren’t reading this through the lens of Gil...

Wait, what? Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of *All the Way to the River*, was seriously planning on murdering her terminally ill partner "because she had taken her affection away from me, and because I was extremely tired"..........?!“I want to make something extremely clear here: When I say that I once planned to murder Rayya, I don’t mean that the idea simply crossed my mind that my life would be easier if she were gone,” Gilbert writes. “I mean that I fully intended to kill her.”Life would be ...

A memoir about two deeply troubled women manipulating each other until one dies, and the other writes a book about it. Seriously? Written in a series of what read like AOL Instant Messenger away messages interspersed with some lucid paragraphs in more of a “humorous email” tone, Elizabeth Gilbert spends months and pages detailing her identification and process for recovery as an addict. It's a journey, alright. The real stuff—her childhood, the marriage she was in when the book began with the ma...

How is it that not a single review here mentions that Elizabeth Gilbert allegedly tried to/planned to murder Rayya? https://bsky.app/profile/thelincoln.b... (Read the screenshots in the link before you comment.)Edit: Here are quotes from Gilbert's book as quoted in https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/...“I mean, I’m the nice lady who wrote Eat Pray Love,” she writes. “And I came very close to premeditatedly and cold-bloodedly murdering my partner because she had taken her affection away from me...

I read an early proof of *All the Way to the River* over the weekend, fully intending to write a review for publication. Having enjoyed Elizabeth Gilbert's other books—both fiction and memoir—immensely, I had high expectations. But after finishing *All the Way to the River*, I've decided to step back from writing a formal review. Ultimately, I couldn't connect with the book in that electric space between author and reader. Despite Gilbert's undeniable skill as a writer, the narrative feels unev...