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Hello and welcome to Happier, a podcast about how to be happier.
We discuss cutting-edge science, the wisdom of the ages, lessons from pop culture and our own experiences with things like reading.
Because one way to be happier is to read great books, and this week it is the Happier Podcast Book Club with Elizabeth Gilbert.
I'm Gretchen Rubin, a writer who studies happiness, good habits, human nature, secrets of adulthood.
I'm in my little home office in New York City and joining me today from Los Angeles is my sister, Elizabeth Craft, my favorite person to have on any reading retreat or conversation about reading.
That's me, Elizabeth Kraft, a TV writer and producer living in Los Angeles.
And Gretchen, I loved this book.
Absolutely.
Can't wait to get into it.
Six and a half years ago, we launched our Happier Podcast Book Club, and today we are thrilled to talk about our latest choice, the absolutely unputdownable memoir All the Way to the River Love, Loss and Liberation by Elizabeth Gilbert.
Liz Gilbert is known for books like her blockbuster memoir her 2006 Eat Pray Love, which sold more than 30 million copies and was made into a movie starring Julia Roberts as Liz Gilbert.
Other books include Committed about marriage, Big Magic about creativity, and the novels The Signature of All Things and City of Girls.
Her latest book has generated tremendous buzz profiles of Liz in all major publications and the book was chosen for Oprah's Book Club.
Here's a description of all the way to the river.
In 2000, a friend sent Liz to see a new hairdresser named Rhea Elias.
An intense and unlikely curiosity sparked between these two apparent opposites.
Rhea, an East Village badass who lived boldly on her own terms but feared she was a failed artist.
Liz, a married people pleaser with a surprisingly unfettered sense of creativity.
Over the years, they became friends, then best friends, then inseparable.
When tragedy entered their lives, the truth was finally laid bare.
The two were in love.
Unacknowledged, they were also a pair of addicts on a collision course toward catastrophe.
What if the love of your life and the person you trusted most in the world became a danger to your sanity and wellbeing?
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 for everyone who has ever been captive to love or to any other passion, substance or craving, and who yearns at long last for peace and freedom.
Hello, Liz.
Hi, Liz.
Hi, Gretchen.
Hi, Elizabeth.
I am so happy to be here with you both.
Thank you.
Well, we are so excited to be talking to you.
We love the book and there's so many things to talk about.
We're really excited to get into it with you.
Let's go.
Let's begin.
And thank you.
Well, let's start with the title.
Elizabeth and I both are fascinated by titles and the choice of titles.
And the origin of this title is so thought-provoking and moving.
Thank you for that.
The book is called All the Way to the River.
When Rhea first found out that she had been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic and liver cancer, and at that point they'd given her six months to live.
We very quickly started referring to her death as the river.
And this was based on a kind of long sort of inside joke friendship story that we had developed over the years about how Rhea gauged the closeness of her various friendships.
So it's sort of based on the geography of New York, but that's how we came to think of the river as like the final, most final final, final distance that you can go with anybody.
Well, there's a beautiful passage where you talk about that.
So you don't have a book with you on your travels.
So I'm going to read it.
I know.
I'm going to read it for you.
I'm going to try to do it justice.
I'm happy to hear you read it, Gretchen.
I'd rather hear you read it than hear me read it.
So let's do it.
Okay, because Rhea said to you that she I want you to walk with me all the way to the river and you promised you would.
And then here's what you write.
It's a perilous journey is what I'm saying to be somebody's all the way to the river relationship.
There is romance in it, but also danger.
Intimacy at that level is rough.
You will see things in yourself and in the other person that will frighten and harm you, and you will experience things that will change you.
I would have not missed my journey with Raya for anything in the world, but I'm not entirely sure I would recommend it.
And I definitely never want to do anything like that again.
Because while much of that walk was magical, a lot of it was exceedingly unbeautiful and painful to endure and I'm pretty sure it shaved a few years off my life.
Maybe this is why you can't know many people in life as well as I knew Rhea.
Maybe, I sometimes contemplate, we're not even supposed to go all the way to the river with anyone.
Maybe there comes a point where we each have to find our own way to the river alone.
And here's another thing I only recently found out, by the way.
What we New Yorkers call the East River is not even a river.
It's a tidal estuary, which means it flows in both directions and its chemistry constantly varies.
Both salty and fresh, it's generative but changeable.
Polluted water and bright new tides are constantly flowing back and forth across invisible boundaries.
Navigation can become tricky.
Extreme brackishness can make underwater visibility low.
Currents are unpredictable.
Swimmers and boaters must be careful not to be swept out to sea.
Honestly, you can't even tell whether this body of water ends at the beginning or begins at the end.
But yes, back to our story.
I promised my beloved friend, Rhea Elias, that I would walk with her all the way to the river.
And God help us, that is exactly what I did.
It's so moving.
So explain this, what you and Rhea were talking about walking from Fifth to the river.
Yeah, so this is a kind of an inside New York geography joke, but the way that Rhea used to define her friendships and the varying levels of intimacy that she had with different people was using the map of downtown New York City as her sort of operative metaphor.
So she would say like, so right in the center, you've got what she called her Fifth Avenue friends.
And those are the people that you're completely superficial with.
You may know them for years and you never let them know you and you never really know them.
Everybody's just operating on this very superficial level of their personas.
And then as you go further east she's like then you get to your fourth and third avenue friends who you allow a little bit more intimacy with.
And then you get to your second and first avenue friends who are like the people you went to college with, and People that you work with, and neighbors and people you might have gone to their wedding and you might have started a business with them.
Like these deeper intimacies.
And then she would say but it's not until you get to your alphabet city friends you know your Avenue A B, C and D friends that you start to experience the true intimacy of people who know each other really well.
These are the people you called when you were going through your divorce, who helped you when you were bankrupt, who brought you to rehab, held you when your mom died, like who you called in the middle of the night when you're having a panic attack, like this deep, deep level of knowing.
And she's like, but that's not it.
The map's not done.
There's still one more level.
If you can find that one person in life who will walk with you all the way to the river, like all the way to the East River, the person who there are no more secrets from, that's the greatest gift in the entire world.
And for years, she had called me her all the way to the river friend.
And I wore that. badge with a great deal of honor.
So when we found out that she was dying it kind of makes a natural sense that we began to call that sort of the ultimate river.
And that promise that I made to her that I would walk with her all the way to the river, was done in great innocence.
Neither of us knowing what that last part of the journey was going to entail.
And both of us thinking that we knew ourselves and each other really well and finding out that On that last leg of the journey, there were some elements of darkness in both of us that neither one of us could have known about until we took that last trek.
And when you were thinking of this book, was it clear to you all along that that was the title of the book?
Yeah, I mean, she and I even talked about it because she always knew and wanted me.
She knew I was going to write about her and she wanted me to.
In fact, she made me promise that I would.
And that was one of the titles that we were banding around.
Yeah.
And when we came up with it, even when we were talking about that, we had not yet experienced the full journey to the river yet.
So it was a little bit more about like true love and the people who know you and love you the best.
And then it got added meanings as we went along.
Well, you write at the end how you were reading her journals, and she wanted you to read her journals because she wanted you to write about her.
Yeah Rhea, really deeply.
For her whole life wanted to be known and had a gift for transparency that was unrivaled.
I don't think I've ever met anyone who was more fearless in terms of walking right into the white-hot, radioactive center of the truth, even if it was a truth about her, even if it was a truth that didn't reflect well on her.
She wrote her own memoir about her long, long stretch of heroin and cocaine addiction and her years of struggling to get sober, called Harley Loco.
She made a short film that was shown at the Berlin Film Festival about being a junkie.
All of her music was about.
One of the things that I loved about Rhea was that she led with the shadow parts that most people spend their lives trying to hide.
And I think that's why she's always felt like such a safe place for me and why she felt like such a safe place for so many people, because she was so unafraid of her own shadows.
That she was certainly unafraid of yours or mine.
And at her funeral, one of our beloved friends, the writer Jonathan Miles, was eulogizing her and he said you know, Rhea didn't want your fake self.
She wouldn't tolerate your fake self.
She would peer closer at your face and be like, dude, what's actually going on?
I can feel that what you're fronting here is not reality.
Or not true?
What are you hiding?
And so, when we knew that she was dying and when she knew that I was writing this book, she gave me her journals and said you know, use everything.
So it's all in there.
But Liz, the funny thing is, as a New Yorker, I had to think, but there's the whole west side.
Maybe that's where you are.
That's where you are now, Liz.
You're walking to the other river, you know?
Well, you know, the Hudson River is a lot tonier than where we were hanging out and certainly much tonier than where she was hanging out back when she was using on the streets.
Yes, I was thinking about Tompkins Square Park.
You talk about her being there and that's right in that ABC neighborhood.
Yeah.
Coming up, we're going to ask Liz more questions, and we have questions from listeners.
But first, this break.
It's so exciting that the holidays are coming close.
I do love the holiday season, but there is so much going on.
Elizabeth, I am now a Thanksgiving host, a huge milestone in my life.
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Because it seems like it's far away, but it will be here before we know it.
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So we have so many interesting questions to ask.
Some come from us, some come from listeners.
And because there's so many, we are not even going to attempt to be linear, Liz.
We're just going to jump around.
But the first one that we wanted to ask was one of the most striking things about the book is how honest you are.
Like you, admit to character flaws, to destructive illusions, your selfish and furious thoughts, the way you hurt people.
And was it hard to get to that level?
Did you do sort of repeated passes as you wrote?
Or were you pulling back?
Because at the same time, there is clearly also a lot of restraint.
There are times when you signal that it's something that... you're not going to go into.
So how did you think about what to include, what to withhold and how to get to those different levels and layers?
Yeah, so where I'm restrained is when I'm talking about other people that are not me and Raya.
So you know my ex-husband, other friends, people who I don't want to pull into the story out of respect my family, things about her family.
There's respectful, I hope, boundaries up around all of that.
The only people who I feel like I was allowed to expose were myself and Rhea, whose permission I had to fully expose ourselves was me and her.
I honestly didn't want to write this book at all.
And the reason that it took seven years to write it was because I didn't want to write it.
And after going through the hell that we went through In the immediate aftermath of her death, all I really wanted was to get as far away from it as I could.
And I ended up writing two whole other books.
And I tried to write this as a novel.
I tried to write it as just a book of poetry and prayers.
I tried not to write it at all.
But it just wouldn't go away.
And I think anybody who engages in any kind of creativity knows that there are some things that are like that where the creative muse is just not going to let you off the hook from this thing.
It's not going to go away.
I call that a blocking project.
It's something that's just blocking your way and you have to go through it.
You gotta go through it, you know?
And so when I finally did make the decision to do it, my hesitancy was not about Honestly, it was not about exposing Raya and it was not even about exposing myself, because it was clear to me once the decision was made to, as Raya told me, write the living shit out of it.
You know, go full punk rock with it.
There was no way to tell that story without telling the entire story.
And there's no reason to tell that story without telling the entire story.
It doesn't even make sense.
And that's why it didn't really make sense when I sort of novelized it and why it didn't make sense when I kind of just wrote poems about how addiction and grief feel, without talking about what actually occurred.
And so once I was like, there's no way out but through, It was very clear to me.
Also, I felt like it was unethical for me to write about Rhea's addiction and not write about mine, when I'm also in multiple 12-step recovery programs.
And that means me showing my shadow side just as much as she was comfortable showing hers.
My hesitancy was...
I didn't want to go back to hell.
You know, like I didn't want to revisit that, especially that awful middle section of the book and that the terrible where we both went down to the most degraded versions of ourselves.
Like I had no interest in revisiting that.
Yeah, yeah.
And even as I was writing it, it was so excruciating.
But it wasn't about, I don't want to be seen in my flaws.
I'm pretty comfortable...
I think actually, the more I reveal my flaws in general, the healthier and more sober and kind of happier I become.
And also the more I hear other people sort of echo like, oh, yes, I'm also like that.
But it was more like I don't want to remember in the granular detail that I'm going to have to to tell this story.
But I really feel like I wasn't given a choice.
And I don't know whether that was Rhea from the Beyond pressuring me, or the universe pressuring me, or the truth demanding to be revealed.
I don't know, but there we are.
You had a very clear sense, yeah.
And Liz, you mentioned your addictions and what you went through during the book.
Now I have been hearing about codependency that term for decades and I feel like I really never understood what it was or why it was bad, until you wrote about it in this book and finally it all clicked and it made me see relationships around me differently, really Made a lot of sense.
And I'm just wondering do you find it hard to untangle these relationships and sort of write clearly in such a way that you're explaining something that I feel like so many other people have tried to explain, but not nearly as effectively?
Yeah.
Well, thanks for that.
I mean, I wasn't just sitting on my hands during those seven years that I wasn't writing this book.
I was also actively working 12-step recovery for sex and love addiction, for codependency.
In Al-Anon, which is a relationship-based program in 12-step that was originally founded as a supportive program for people who are in love with active addicts and alcoholics, which is often where codependency shows up, where somebody is the addict and somebody else is the enabler.
Oftentimes the healthier partner actually hiding.
You know behaviors that are just as unhealthy as the blackout trunk.
And so I was in those programs, uncovering these things in myself and learning, working to heal and reveal these things in myself.
And largely one of the words that I felt like was a motive for me as I was writing.
The book was forensic.
I was doing a forensic investigation into my own pathologies, but I was also trying to do a forensic investigation into what exactly happened.
And I think this is something that many people can relate to unfortunately, in relationships that they may have had where how did this thing that started so radiantly go to such an incredibly dark place?
And if I had written the book directly in the aftermath of Rhea's death, I'm afraid that the book would have been about what a nice person I am and what a terrible thing happened to me.
And I'm never really interested in reading that book because life is never that completely simple.
And the question that I had been living in all those years was what was my role in the insanity of my own life, which is a really good and self-accountable question, I think, for anybody who finds themselves in situations where their life feels unmanageable to ask like what is the part that I'm playing in this?
How am I contributing to this insanity?
Who am I blaming for the insanity of the life that I am living?
And all of those are questions that start to unpack what codependency is.
And then I got really fascinated by it.
And I also, you know, over the years in the rooms picked up some really great funny definitions that I heard people say.
One of my favorite being codependency is watching in horror as somebody else's life flashes before your face.
Right.
I remember I underlined that line.
You know you're so obsessed with the way that they're living that you're not focusing on your own life at all.
Or another one is the motto of the codependent is you break it, we fix it.
And then my uncle, who's in 12-step recovery, gave me a really great one.
The definition of a codependent is...
Well, the old joke is how do you kill a codependent?
You lock them in a round, windowless empty room and tell them that there's somebody sitting in the corner suffering, who needs their help.
And then you watch as they run themselves to death trying to find the person who needs them.
It's such an elegant and dark and funny and accurate description of that particular behavioral pathology.
So I'm glad a little bit that you found that.
There's a funny thing when I first came into the room as my first sponsor, I was talking to her and I was starting to sort of get wisdom and understanding about what had happened with me and Rhea.
And I said, it's almost like we both created this nightmare escape that we were in.
You know, it's almost like I had as much to do with it as she did, because she reverted back to being a cocaine and opioid addict at the end.
And it was a nightmare.
And I was like it's almost like when I was looking at my own part in that.
It's like, It's almost like I did that too.
It's almost like we did that together.
And she's like Liz.
The word codependent very conveniently has the prefix co right at the beginning of it as a clue.
It's something that you do with someone.
Yes, you guys 100% did that together.
Fascinating.
So switching gears, this is a question from Meredith.
She said, I listened to the audiobook and it was wonderful.
She did a phenomenal job of reading it.
My question is, what was the recording process like?
How long did it take?
Was it difficult to revisit some of the chapters when reading them out loud?
And what did that feel like?
It sounded like Elizabeth Gilbert almost started crying once or twice.
Oh God, I did start crying multiple times and we had to do lots of different takes.
And part of the reason, and thank you for that.
So Rhea was a musician and for many years her producer and producer.
Really, I would say, in many ways, her best friend for many years was this music producer named Barb Morrison.
And Barb was one of the people when Rhea started using again who had to back out of Rhea's life.
One of the people who would not co-sign Rhea's bullshit.
One of the people who was like, don't pretend this is cool when it's completely not cool.
You have absolutely relapsed into addiction.
And their friendship really suffered as a result.
But years later, I became friends with Barb.
And when it came time to read the book, I asked Barb if I could read it at their studio.
And it was a place where Rhea had recorded music.
And actually, Barb's recording studio was their living room.
So I was sitting watching Barb's face.
While I was reading about this person who was for both of us, our very best and closest friend.
And then at one point I remember we read the section and Barb stood up and said I feel like I need to go throw up.
Oh, wow.
This is so intense.
Wow.
So it was the most intimate.
And what I said to my publisher was I can't go sit in a sterile recording studio and read this book while some tech bro is at the soundboard.
Like I need to be in a place that's safe and I need to, it's gotta be here.
It's gotta be in this room that Rhea knew with this person who Rhea knew.
So I think the intimacy and the emotionality that you hear in the reading of the book is a direct result of that decision.
That's beautiful.
It was intense yeah, liz.
Another listener, who did not use their name, asked how did you manage to be so productive and successful in your writing career with this love and sex addiction?
Often, people with addictions and I would think this one would be no exception are unable to focus on themselves, their own lives and their own projects, because everything is second to the addictive substance.
These are such good questions.
Our listeners really love the book.
Yes.
Oh, my Lord.
We have a very bookish audience.
Yeah.
You know the sort of darker, shadowy version of that would be that work is a place I run to to hide in.
Mm.
And certainly I could be accused of workaholism.
And even in the aftermath of Riz death, the very first thing I did was sit down and write a novel.
I started writing it within a few weeks of her dying, almost in a fugue state.
That's a darker way to see it.
I think maybe a more spiritual way to see it, a less sort of psychopathological way to see it, is that it's been a gift my entire life to have something that I am in relationship with, where that relationship is not unwell.
Like my relationship with my creativity is probably the healthiest relationship I have in my life, apart from, I would say, my relationship with my, The God of my own understanding.
And I think those two things are very linked.
And so even when I was a kid, creativity was where I was safe.
You know, it was where I was safe.
It was where I could disappear and not even necessarily in a pathological way.
It was where I could create.
It was where I could have control.
One of the really beautiful things for me about being a novelist is when I'm writing fiction, I have the thing that I'm always trying to do in all my human relationships, which is be in charge of people's behavior.
Yes.
I can create these beautiful worlds where everybody does what I think they should do.
And that is obviously not at all what it's like out here in the real world.
So I get a lot of joy from my creativity.
I get a lot of really straightforward joy.
And I think anybody who's read Big Magic knows knows that about the way that I engage with it.
So I would say it was a place of refuge and always has been.
And it's a place too of competency and it's where I don't feel crazy.
And it's where I don't feel like I'm failing.
And I think yeah, I like to say this, especially as women, and as women in our 50s I think it's really important for women to claim and own and name how competent they are at certain things.
So I've been writing professionally for 30 years and I'm good at it and I enjoy it and I do well at it.
And it's like, those are things we're sort of taught.
We're not allowed to say.
But I think it's beautiful when women say this is the thing I do, that I'm excellent at.
And you should hire me for it.
Because I'm good at it.
And on the other hand, there's lots of things where I would say don't come to me for guidance in these realms, because you should probably talk to somebody who's good at those things.
And I'm not good at that.
Like staying married, for instance.
Not good at that, but good at writing books.
And there's a pleasure...
There's a pleasure in doing something that you're good at and knowing, while you're doing it, that you're good at it.
There's a joy in it.
Absolutely.
Coming up, we've got more questions for Liz, but first this break.
Gretch, you know how much I love Audible.
Audiobooks are such a huge part of my life.
I'm always telling people to start listening to audiobooks.
What I love is that Audible has something for everyone.
My most recent book I have teed up to listen to is...
Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yaros.
I am a huge romance lover have been since I was 12 years old and I've heard so much about this book.
I cannot wait to start listening.
Yeah, that's the great thing about Audible.
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Well, hi, everybody.
It's Julia Louis-Dreyfus from the Wiser Than Me podcast.
And I'm not going to talk about food waste this time.
I'm going to talk about food resources.
All that uneaten food rotting in the landfill.
It could be enriching our soil or feeding our chickens, because it's still food.
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And Liz, you know, you talk a lot about 12-step programs in the book.
And Aaron asked.
I just finished reading the book and now can't help but examine my dating life through the lens of love and sex addiction.
I'm wondering if Elizabeth has heard of any increase in people showing up at 12-step programs based on the realities and awareness she brought to addiction in her book, and specifically love and sex addiction.
There you go.
I have heard.
I've been hearing of that anecdotally from other people.
And I've also been in meetings where people have approached me and said which is funny because it's a breach of anonymity, but I blew up my own anonymity at this point so hard.
I don't think, like once you talked about it on TV with Oprah, I don't think you really can be like clutching your pearls and being like please don't breach my anonymity in this meeting.
But, you know, people will come up and say, you know, I'm at this meeting because of your book.
Wow.
And that's the part too, that I know Rhea would love, because when Rhea wrote her own memoir about addiction, Harley Loco one of the proudest times I've ever seen like when I saw her like in her fullest sort of.
The right kind of pride in herself not the arrogant kind of pride, but like real, true kind of spiritual pride in herself was Rikers Island.
The jail in New York at that time still open opened up a library within their branch, a little tiny jail cell that was turned into a lending library that it was actually a branch of the New York Public Library.
And Raya had spent multiple times at Rakers Island. in her life, and her book mentions it.
And so they invited her to come be part of the ribbon-cutting ceremony.
And it was obviously the first time she'd been at Rikers since she was a prisoner.
And it was a pretty formal event in a way.
The director of the New York Public Library was there and there were some local congresspeople there.
And Rhea had written a speech, and she was nervous about giving her speech.
But then they They marched in like 10 women who were in beige jumpsuits, who were prisoners at Rikers, and sat them down and we found out they were the biggest readers there.
And when Rhea saw them, she just started crying.
And they had them sitting at the back.
It was so kind of awful.
It was like here are the sort of formal people and then we'll just let these 10 prisoners come and sit at the back.
And when Rhea saw them, it's one of my favorite memories ever, she ripped her speech up.
And threw it over her shoulder and she pointed to them and she's like Hey, you guys, I wrote the speech for them.
And she pointed to the guys in the suits.
She's like, but that I'm just going to talk to you.
And, and, and, Cause I was exactly where you are.
And she just gave this like moving kind of spontaneous qualification.
We would call it in the rooms of 12 step about her life of addiction and where it brought her.
And that's all she wanted and why she wrote that book.
And it's why she made that film and it's why she made that music was that she wanted to have her story help people.
That's what she wanted for her, and I think that if she knew... that this book is helping people.
And it's not just people.
I'm not just hearing about people saying they're checking out the rooms of Codependency Anonymous, or Sex and Love X Anonymous or Al-Anon.
People are saying, sending direct messages, saying like I just went to my first AA meeting in 15 years because I finished reading your book and I forgot.
I forgot, I'm an alcoholic.
I forgot.
I'm an alcoholic and my life has been getting unmanageable and I really need recovery.
And I forgot.
So that's been really touching.
So here's another question from a listener.
Rachel asked, what did Rhea's family think of the memoir?
Well, it depended on which family member you talk to because, like your family and like my family, they're not a unilateral family.
Yeah, that makes sense.
They're not a unit.
They're composed of individuals who had varying degrees of reaction to it.
And I want to be private and respectful. to them about some of those conversations.
But I can only say that I gave the manuscript a year before it was published to everybody in her family to make sure that they had plenty of time to think about it.
And I also asked people to let me know if they felt like there was anything, and not just her family, that her close friends who were involved at the time of her death.
And the question that I had for everybody was you know, please let me know if you feel like there's anything in here that was either unfair or untrue.
So we had some I had some intense conversations and changed some things in the book as a result.
Took some things out where there were disagreements that I didn't feel.
You know like I was like.
This isn't worth somebody being upset over.
It's not...
That's how I remember it, but it doesn't need to be there if it's going to cause an upset.
And then left a couple things in where I felt like this was my actual lived experience and I'm going to stand by this.
But there were conversations that were had at the time and some of them loved it and some of them didn't love it.
I didn't know how I could be more in integrity than how I did that.
Of course, Liz, you've said in interviews that you don't read reviews.
I'm sure some of it seeps in, and you are at the center of so much attention and success for this book.
As we said, you know, it was an Oprah book club pick.
Doesn't get bigger than that.
And we're just wondering does it feel like a threat to your recovery ever all of that attention and success?
Because like you said, the success of Eat, Pray, Love sort of spun you a bit.
Or is it a good strengthener to have all that attention because now you feel held accountable?
Yeah.
Oh, God, these questions are so good.
I like that turn at the end.
It's like, that's really interesting.
Well, nothing's ever going to be what Eat, Pray, Love was.
That was such a phenomenon.
And I think the definition of a phenomenon is that It can't be replicated.
It won't be replicated.
And it can't even really even be understood.
Like what that book went and did in the world.
And it did that before social media.
You know, like I wasn't even on the internet, barely when that book was out there selling those millions of copies.
And riding the wave of that when I was also a lot younger was pretty destabilizing.
The thing that I think was so anchoring for me at that time was that My marriage was very stabilizing and my husband was very stabilizing.
And that's where I found ground was in, like I can come home and I know who this person is and he knows who I am.
And this is a safe, like I'm safe here in my house.
I'm cared for for reasons that have nothing to do with what this book is doing.
I'm finding grounding now.
And again, it's not going to be at that level.
And the world's a lot more distracted now.
You know what I mean?
There was a minute a couple weeks ago where everybody was talking about this book, but that minute, I think, has already passed past, you know, and the book will continue to find who it's meant to find, but I don't think it will be the same sort of blistering level of attention that Eat Pray Love brought.
But the grounding that I have is what I didn't have back then, which is my own ground of being.
That isn't about somebody else being my stabilizing force.
My ex-husband was my stabilizing force for many years.
Raya was my stabilizing force.
Part of my love addiction has been a constant search for who will keep me grounded, who will make me feel safe, who will make my nervous system be calm like what person will make me be okay?
And that isn't something i'm doing anymore and um and through these years of recovery and these practices that i've found through my 12-step community um, through my sobriety, and always my, my physical sobriety and my emotional sobriety, which is the the primary priority of my life.
Like these, are these anchoring rituals and my deeper relationship with the presence that I call God is, I think, as long as that remains foremost and true.
I mean Raya was the one who taught me.
It's a line they say in 12-step, but they're like if you put anything in front of your sobriety, you will lose everything.
You'll lose the thing you put in front of your sobriety and you'll lose your sobriety.
So nothing goes in front of my sobriety and so it's been an.
You know it was an intense couple weeks when the book came out and i knew it would be, but it passes and and people move their attention to other things and as long as i keep my focus on what keeps me well, it should be okay Good.
Well, the last question, Liz.
We always like to ask us if you have a try this at home suggestion, something small and concrete that people can do as part of their ordinary days to make themselves happier healthier, more productive or more creative.
Do you have a suggestion you'd like to offer?
I would love to offer and also extend an invitation to community in this thing.
So for many, many years I've had this practice of I write myself a daily letter from what I call the spirit of unconditional love, which conveniently spells soul.
Wow, and I've done it.
It got me through the darkest times of my life.
And the letter always begins with the same prompt where I say dear love, what would you have me know today?
And then I respond and I write myself a letter, as though unconditional love is speaking to me.
And the prompt question is sort of this act of imagination, like if there was a presence in the room, in your heart, in spirit, that loved you unconditionally right this moment.
What would it want you to know today?
What would it want you to know more than anything in the entire world?
What is it trying to communicate to you?
And then you write that letter.
And so this has become a daily mental health practice for me.
And A couple of years ago, I started wondering whether it was teachable.
And so I opened up a Substack account called Letters from Love.
And now there are 200,000 of us over there.
And every week...
I invite somebody to a guest to write themselves a letter from the spirit of unconditional love.
And then I share one that I've written.
And then people in the comments share ones that they've written to themselves.
And it's the safest.
If you need a non-toxic place on the internet to go, it is the safest, safest and most loving community.
I subscribe to it yes, me too.
So that practice of course you don't have to come to the letters from love community to do it, but but to give it a try to turn your heart toward itself I find to be deeply moving and very beautiful.
I'll just share that.
When the Dalai Lama first came to the United States, the thing he was most shocked by was how the rampant consumerism and the rampant self-hatred Both of which kind of are the same thing.
And in fact the self-hatred, I think, leads to the rampant consumerism and the rampant consumerism feeds the self-hatred.
And so this practice of learning how to speak and write to yourself lovingly can be a way to reverse that.
Those cultural and familial messages that we may have all inherited or that are in the groundwater here, that say you know that question your own value and your own worth.
So I invite you to try.
Wonderful.
Well, that's a beautiful practice, a great suggestion for all our listeners.
So thank you, Liz.
It's so wonderful to talk to you.
So great.
Thank you for such a brilliant interview.
I love those questions.
And thank you to your community for being part of this.
Now, we're still very interested to hear your impressions and reflections on this powerful memoir.
Let us know on Instagram threads, TikTok, Facebook.
Drop us an email at podcast at GretchenRubin.com.
Or as always, you can go to the show notes.
This is happiercast.com slash 557 for everything related to this episode.
Remember.
Whenever it is and wherever you are, there's always a book waiting for you.
And that's it for this episode of Happier.
Remember to try this at home.
Read Liz Gilbert's memoir, All the Way to the River.
And if you've already read it, read another one of her terrific books.
Thanks to our wonderful guest, Liz Gilbert.
Thank you to our executive producer, Chuck Reed and everyone at Lemonada.
If you haven't subscribed to Lemonada Premium yet, now is the time.
Just tap that subscribe button on Apple Podcasts or head to LemonadaPremium.com.
And here's your rhyming reminder.
If you like the show, tell others you know.
Until next week, I'm Elizabeth Craft.
And I'm Gretchen Rubin.
Thanks for joining us Onward and Upward.
Elizabeth, it made me want to rewatch the movie Eat, Pray, Love.
I saw it when it came out all those years ago, but I haven't seen it since.
It made me want to go back and watch it.
Yes, and it made me go back and reread the book.
So now I'm even more interested in going and watching the movie again.
From the Onward Project.
Every day of this new administration, Americans are being told that they're less than and too divided to work together.
So how do we move forward?
I'm Stacey Abrams and each week on my podcast, Assembly Required we zoom out from the headlines to focus on the big picture in politics, culture and tech, finding ways to fight back against tyranny with optimism and the concrete steps needed to build a better future together.
Tune in to new episodes every Thursday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast.
