All the Way to the River: Oprah's Book Club
Love, Loss, and Liberation
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4.3 • 162 Ratings
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
AN OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK
"A delicious mashup of narrative that's by turns harrowing and healing." –People
“Entertaining, insightful, wrenching … punch-to-the-gut powerful.” –The Washington Post
“A blockbuster: brutally honest, lurid, transcendent, and compelling…Gilbert is undoubtedly a force.” —Boston Globe
In her first nonfiction book in a decade, the #1 bestselling writer who taught millions of readers to live authentically (Eat Pray Love) and creatively (Big Magic) shows how to break free.
In 2000, Elizabeth Gilbert met Rayya. They became friends, then best friends, then inseparable. When tragedy entered their lives, the truth was finally laid bare: The two were in love. They were also a pair of addicts, on a collision course toward catastrophe.
What if your most beautiful love story turned into your biggest nightmare? What if the dear friend who taught you so much about your self-destructive tendencies became the unstable partner with whom you disastrously reenacted every one of them? And what if your most devastating heartbreak opened a pathway to your greatest awakening?
All the Way to the River is a landmark memoir that will resonate with anyone who has ever been captive to love—or to any other passion, substance, or craving—and who yearns, at long last, for liberation.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Elizabeth Gilbert wrote one of the all-time-great self-discovery memoirs with Eat Pray Love. Now, opening up for the first time about the cherished relationship that was also the basis for her most self-destructive behavior, she does the same thing for addiction and loss. When Gilbert met artist Rayya Elias, their acquaintance turned to deep friendship, and then to consuming romantic love. But that beautiful, intoxicating connection ultimately came with two sources of darkness that Gilbert sorts through with devastating honesty: a shattering sex-and-love addiction, and the loss she endured when Elias died of cancer in 2018. The vivid way Gilbert describes the emotional hunger of codependence is palpable, and so is the visceral pain of her grief. Her memoir ultimately becomes a tale about hope, recovery, and navigating life as a person who, for better or worse, is on a constant search for meaning.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bestseller Gilbert (City of Girls) discusses in this inspiring account how she struggled through financial hazards, obsessive love affairs, and emotional land mines on her way to "a healthy relationship with myself" after a tumultuous romance. Gilbert first met Rayya Elias in 2000, when Elias began cutting Gilbert's hair just before the author grew disenchanted with her first marriage. The pair gradually evolved from casual friends to soulmates, with Gilbert ending her second marriage to start a relationship with Elias in the 2010s after Elias received a terminal pancreatic cancer diagnosis. After the couple consummated their attraction, both fell deeper into addiction—Gilbert to love and sex, Elias to alcohol and drugs. After Elias died in 2018, Gilbert examined her addictions and arrived at a spiritual awakening ("I gave my life to God then, the way I used to give it to strangers"). Gilbert achieves her signature intimacy through a bluntly confessional tone ("Sex has always been the fastest and most direct way for me to feel thoroughly chosen") and an admirable ability to stare darkness in the face without losing hope. Readers struggling with addiction or seeking a path through heartbreak will find invaluable wisdom in these pages.
Customer Reviews
Soul level Beautiful, Raw and Honest
This has to be one of the most tender, humbling and gorgeous books I have ever had the pleasure of reading. This book found me. Spoke to me in so many ways, served as a mirror to me. And it is indeed a beautiful portrait of unconditional love. I loved the drawings and the poems. And the deeply spiritual undertones. Must read!
A more fitting title, Cry Me a River
Another self-confession by the author of Eat Pray Love on her lifelong quest to live selfishly while crying “poor me” and her privileged life. This time she writes about her drug fueled love affair all the way to the grave. The book revels in manipulation, getting high, living extravagantly, breaking laws, lying and hurting people, then circles through AA, codependency, and regret before twisting the consequences into a specifically crafted lesson from God. It’s utter BS, and frankly I couldn’t stand either one of them. There was some great commentary on addiction, and lousy poetry. She also misrepresents a quote by Einstein. Another disappointing Oprah Book Club pick and my last read by this author.
All the way to the river
I was so disappointed by this book. Narcissistic and hard to believe, also so disrespectful of her girlfriend’s memory. Shame, shame, shame.