Bingo square: RED (as in red flag as well as the cover). Content note: Cancer, death, drug addiction, abuse. I picked this book up because I read the excerpts elsewhere, and I was curious about the bigger picture–and also my thesis was on elegy, poems about dead people, and some of the questions that poets ask about how to remember the dead rather than create the dead in their own image still resonate with me. In Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search For Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia (2006), Gilbert seeks everything (except the Oxford comma), because why not, who doesn’t deserve it all, and finds love; in Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage (2010), she seeks a reason to marry the man she finds at the end of Eat, Pray Love; in All The Way to the River: Love, Loss and Liberation, she seeks–I don’t know. Self-ablation? Absolution? The ability to accept the things she cannot change? The last, at least, is certainly a worthy goal, whether within the AA framework or not.
Apparently the zest for life, spiritual peace and purpose, and love, that Gilbert discovered in Italy, India, and Indonesia did not last. Gilbert still talks to her version of God, a voice within that talks back (in the form of fairly excruciating poetry), but the discipline and practices of spirituality, impulse control, and practical care for others that she worked hard to develop during her travels have dissipated through neglect and distraction. At the beginning of this book, Gilbert is married, somewhat adrift, with some fame and a lot of money–and then her best friend Rayya Elias, a Syrian-American hairdresser and former drug addict is diagnosed with terminal cancer and Gilbert acknowledges that her love for Rayya is not just platonic and moves in with her in order to make her remaining months as comfortable and exciting as possible. This leads Gilbert down a very dark path indeed: Rayya relapses in the wake of the devastation caused by chemo, fear of dying, and existential dread, and Gilbert not only enables her drug addiction (cocaine to balance out the pain-killing opiates, among others) but becomes burned out with caregiving, exacerbated by the very natural if unproductive guilt that comes with being burned out by caregiving. And this is, I think, a useful narrative to put out there–witnessing death is really fucking hard, and comes at a cost, no matter how beloved the dying person is. We see ourselves clearly in the dark and it’s not easy. But the way Gilbert does this is, well, perhaps the way you’d expect the author of Eat, Pray, Love to do this.
I don’t feel comfortable writing about Rayya Elias here, and I don’t feel comfortable with how Gilbert writes about, or indeed sometimes against, Rayya Elias. It’s hard to say why–perhaps because Gilbert seems so goddamned determined to find the enlightenment, the liberation, at the end of this dark path that it almost begins to seem retroactive; the flailing scramble towards death, the way to the East River which Gilbert uses as a metaphor, becomes a journey. Perhaps because the way Gilbert encloses Rayya’s body and heritage and even her dead mother within her self reminds me too much of how Ted Hughes wrote about Sylvia Plath in Birthday Letters (1998), in which he twists everything about their love into some sort of cosmically fated tragedy rather than the product of human choices and errors (thus conveniently absolving himself of both choices and errors). The self-immolation of guilt becomes a fire at which the memoirist/poet is tempted to warm their own feet rather than purify themselves. Gilbert wants everything out of this experience.
But what really bothered the hell out of me was the metaphor of ‘Earth School’ that Gilbert twists this experience into–the idea that people are put on this earth to learn from each other, which, fair enough, I guess. But this thing begins with a cosmic conference room that takes place before the person is born, where the person selects others to be the teachers and helpers that they’ll then encounter in some form during their actual lives. This would be harmless, if violently twee, bullshit if not for the following:
But some of the really brave students–the ones who wanted to make the most of their experience at Earth School–asked “Okay, who will volunteer to be my abuser this time” or “Who will be my alcoholic family member?” or “Who will be the lover who betrays me?” or “Who will be the child who breaks my heart?” or “Who will be the one who dies and leaves me all alone?”
Now here comes the miracle.
To each request, some benevolent soul on the other side of the boardroom raised their hand and said “I’ll do that for you, my love. I’ll do that.”
…
Wouldn’t that be incredibly generous of someone, to do that for you? To help you grow like that? (p. 49-50)
What the actual fuck. Abuse is not a requisite for making the most of life. Abuse is not a teachable moment or a path towards personal growth. It is not a generous or loving gesture to abuse someone for their own good. What the actual actual fuck is this masochistic martyr complex shit.
I’ve been gripped by Gilbert’s writing before, even when I’ve been somewhat skeptical about the content and message, and I was looking for something to be gripped by, even if it was the story of a tragic mess of a situation. This is certainly tragic and messy (and I haven’t even touched on Gilbert’s own love and sex addiction and codependency here), underpinned by highly problematic messaging–but it also wasn’t that gripping, overall–you don’t really need to buy the book. Actually, amend that. You really don’t need to buy this book. I would give no stars if I could. Hell, I’d give minus stars if I could.