Love now and always.
The love was stronger than anything.
And I love you more than anything.
There's still love.
From the New York Times, I'm Anna Martin.
This is Modern Love.
Today, I'm talking to Elizabeth Gilbert.
You probably think you know Elizabeth Gilbert.
Eat, Pray, Love, Julia Roberts played her in the movie.
But I'm telling you, you don't.
She's got a new memoir out, and it gets dark.
There were times when I was reading this, where I put my book down and I was like this is the Eat Pray, Love lady.
So today Liz is here to tell me about how that woman, a woman who thought she'd found enlightenment and inner peace, almost destroyed her own life.
Here's our conversation.
Elizabeth Gilbert, welcome to Modern Love.
Thank you.
I am so happy to be here.
We are so happy you're here in the studio with us.
So, Liz, you are the author of the bestselling 2006 memoir, Eat, Pray, Love.
This is all about your search for inner peace following a painful divorce.
You ended up marrying the guy you wrote about in Eat Pray Love and writing a second book about this decision to commit to marriage again.
And now you have a new memoir out.
It's called All the Way to the River and it tells the story of how you ended that marriage to then start a romantic relationship with your best friend Rhea, right as she was dying of cancer.
Which, I mean, what a mix of emotions to experience at once.
You must have been running through journals like once a week.
How were you processing all of that?
Oh, God.
Oh, yeah, I was running through journals once a week.
And it was like the ground fell out from underneath me.
And I feel like that's an experience that I now recognize as being a universal human experience.
Like maybe not to those exact details, but I don't think anybody gets to go through the entire course of their life without having seasons or chapters or episodes of their life where it's like Oh, I thought there was ground under my feet and there is none.
And yeah, it was incredibly disorienting and felt to me at the time extremely sudden and unexpected.
How did I get here?
Yeah, how did I get here? who was one of your closest, if not your closest friend.
She was more than my closest friend.
I mean, she was the only way that we could ever describe each other for many years was this is my person.
And it was a slow burn.
We met as hairdresser and client.
I love this.
You know, and then became social friends, and then neighbors, and then sort of each other's muses and each other's inspiration.
I dedicated the book Big Magic to her.
I wrote it.
I wrote the entire book for her.
And she, you know, I inspired her to write music.
I inspired her to write a memoir.
She inspired me to write that book.
We became each other's, you know, emergency contacts.
And all of this was happening while I was also in a marriage that I cared about a lot, with somebody who I loved a lot.
But as time went by, it was like oh, this is more than like.
The feelings that I have for her are very inconvenient now.
It's not the word I thought you were going to say.
It's like D is so inconvenient because I'm really in love with my best friend.
And I am really good at compartmentalizing.
So I just compartmentalized that right into the basement of my consciousness.
And I was like, this will stay there forever.
There's a lock.
There's a key.
Nobody needs to know that.
I don't even need to know this.
I put this so far away that I can't even see it.
And then she was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic and liver cancer and given six months to live, at which point it was no longer possible for me to keep that kept in the basement.
It just had to come out and I knew that I had to spend the last months of her life with her as her partner, and that's.
So in a way, there was something like, this is the person I know best in the entire world.
So there was something so deeply familiar about her.
And then, as the book tells, it's like, oh, there was all this other stuff I didn't even know about.
How can the person who you think you know the best in the world turn into somebody who is a danger to you?
So in many ways, the book is like, the word I keep using is forensic.
It's a forensic exploration to try to answer, in the safety of the present moment, why the chaos of the past occurred.
Yeah.
Talk more about that word, what does that forensic mean to you?
Detailed?
Yeah, it means unflinching.
You know, like, let's just really find out what occurred and how.
And I feel like it required a kind of reporting to write this book.
And I had all my journals from that time as well.
But also a deep psychological investigation into myself and into Rhea, including...
And Rhea had left me almost as clues all of her journals and diaries that she wrote during that time.
And she was like, use these.
Like, I want you to have this.
Explicitly, she said that.
Yeah.
And in those journals and diaries, I found out that she had been, she was an addict in recovery.
By the time I knew her when I first met her in the year 2000, she'd been clean for a few years from years of heroin and cocaine addiction.
Mm-hmm.
But somewhere in that time, between when I met her and we got closer, she started secretly drinking.
And then she started publicly drinking, but with weird sort of... You write about this, yeah.
Like very, very weird sort of hiding, like hiding in plain sight.
And this was before you'd entered into your romantic relationship.
Long before that.
But what I discovered in reading her journals was that the same demons that had driven her to her addiction in the first place were real.
Alive and well and hiding behind this mythos that she created that I 100% fell for.
And when I say that she did this, it's all very innocent.
You know, like she was just trying to survive.
But she could present as the most confident person you've ever met in your entire life.
As can I. She jumped off the page that she was so vibrant and she made me want to follow her.
And I was reading about her.
I haven't met her, obviously, in person, but that really came across.
Well, I'm glad to hear that, because one of the obstacles that I felt I faced writing this was can I describe how vivid this person was convincingly?
And I had fearlessness in realms of her life where she was very afraid.
So she was incredibly fearless around people and conflict, no problem.
Like go right into the arena with anyone, toe to toe with anybody, would say the thing that nobody else would say.
I don't know why this is coming, but in the book there's this lovely.
It's just a small scene, but you were at a dinner and she was seated next to someone who was very annoying and she said to him something like you're a jackass, or something like that.
She said to him, wow, I never knew what a little bitch you could be.
And she just said it very casually.
And he was being a little bitch, you know?
Sometimes people are little bitches.
She's like, dude, I literally never knew what a little bitch you are.
But it was also true, you know?
True.
And it's like, we were all thinking it.
Right.
And somehow...
He kind of loved her more for that because oddly and I know this might be hard to convey she wasn't judging him.
She was just making an observation.
Totally.
I mean, I liked her more when I read that.
She was like, I'm a little bitch sometimes too, man.
And that's why people always felt really safe with her, is that she – you always knew where you stood with Rhea.
And when I asked her one time why you're not afraid of anybody –
She's like, I'm so much scarier than anyone.
Wow.
And my darkness and my demons are scarier than anything I've ever seen.
So no one scares me because it's like, if I can handle me, I can handle you.
Did this relationship feel different from previous romantic relationships in your life?
Yeah.
And it's because of that honesty that, excuse me.
Please.
I should burp.
Yeah.
Pardon me.
No, no.
It's picked up in high fidelity.
Great.
That one's for the ages.
It did feel different.
It did feel different.
And it was because of the radical honesty that the Rhea who I fell in love with lived in.
And how can I say this?
Like there aren't many people who say tell me the truth, who want it and who, when they say there will be no judgment or punishment for this truth, they mean it.
So the safety of, like you know, my favorite version of Raya was the one who would just look at you and just be like What is it?
What's the thing that's happening right now?
I see something in your face that's going on that you're not saying.
Like, I don't need your zipped up self was one of her favorite lines.
And a friend of ours at her funeral said she didn't want your fake self.
She wouldn't allow your fake self.
She would go in the cave and dig it out and be like, listen, I smell bullshit.
There's something you're not telling me.
You're being a little bitch.
What's actually going on?
And that was the safety that was provided.
And I had never experienced that with anybody.
It is so... I really get a sense of that.
Like, I feel that from you as you're describing it.
I felt it in the book.
And it's so striking to me that that enduring, totally unique, you know, sort of once-in-a-lifetime safety that you experienced with her could turn into something that felt so dangerous.
This is a beautiful book of love and connection and it's also it goes to some extremely dark places about addiction and death.
And I want to talk about sort of how things got progressively...
Darker and darker for the two of you.
Can you explain how that kind of safety could transform into something that felt so unsafe?
Yeah.
And I want to start by saying that part of the reason it took me seven years to write this book is because it took me so long to figure out what happened.
Because it felt so sudden at the time.
But I know reality well enough to know, well, let me put this this way.
Probably if I'd written this book right after she died, I would have been like I'm a really nice person who a bad thing happened to.
I'm a really nice person.
And a bad thing did happen.
But we co-created the circumstances for this.
And an early sponsor of mine in 12-Step Recovery.
Talking about codependency, said Liz, the word codependency has the prefix co-built right into it, right at the front of it, keeping it right there where you can see it.
You two did this together, right?
She was hiding her substance addiction issues by secretly drinking.
She'd also started smoking again.
When we came together, we started doing psychedelics again.
We were introducing substances into her system And for somebody who is a low-bottom drug addict like a low-bottom drug addict, like a living on a park bench in Tompkins Square, multiple times in jail, multiple times in psych wards, like super dangerous thing that she was playing with there to be altering her mind with lots of different substances and still calling herself sober.
It's one thing to be doing it.
It's another thing to be doing it and still calling yourself sober.
And going out on the road...
As like speaking as a sober person, writing a book about your sobriety when you're not at all sober.
You didn't know any of this.
No, because I didn't know anything about.
I mean, I knew she was doing those things, but I didn't know what sober meant.
I didn't know what addiction meant, really.
Yeah.
And she was good salesperson for her own bullshit.
Like all addicts, right?
And I was an eager believer of every single thing that she did.
So that was her darkness.
And then mine was that I was slowly making her into my God.
And that feeling of anchoring and safety in another human being is something that I've been looking for my entire life.
And so when I found that feeling, I'm like oh, this is now my God, which is why I felt like the bottom fell out of my world when she was diagnosed, because now my God is going to die.
So what do I do as an acolyte to my God?
I serve them.
I give my life as sacrifice to them.
I indulge every single thing that they could possibly ever want, right?
I set no—you don't set boundaries of the God, right?
Boundary, first of all, anyway, what even is that?
I'm just trying to think about what that would look like.
Yeah, setting boundaries with the God.
You don't.
I mean, so I put myself in this— in this position of servitude and service, which was also more easily done because she was dying.
She had cancer, so it's like, I will be in service to you.
But any want that you have, I could not bear for her to have a want.
So anything that she wanted, I would give and provide.
And that is not the first time I have done that.
It didn't turn out to be the last time I would do it either.
So this is my way of securing what we call in the rooms of recovery LAVA love attention, validation and acceptance.
Love, attention, validation, and acceptance.
So that's my drug.
So if somebody can provide me with a feeling of that, you can have my whole entire life, right?
And everything that Rhea did was right and everything she believed was right.
And she was the answer to every question.
In the moment, you didn't know this, right?
You weren't aware of this.
No, I was like, we're living the greatest love story the world has ever known.
And it felt like that for a while.
I mean, we got really high off each other.
I certainly got very high off of her.
Like, if I'm getting lava...
What a convenient acronym.
It's just so good.
It's really good.
And also, if I'm getting lava, if there's a threat that you might now withhold it, I'm going to die.
Like, I will go into withdrawal.
I will go into despair.
I will go into chaos.
So this is what we were co-creating.
And so by the time her pain from her pain from cancer and her fear of death got significant enough that she was given a lot of opioids, which now she's got opioids in her system.
And when I asked her what it felt like the first time she took a morphine pill, she was like hello, old friend, like literally.
I mean, that was the love of her life.
Opioids were the thing that she had always loved and had longed for for many years.
And then, when the opioids started making her feel really down, she was like, if I just add a touch of cocaine to this, and then we were off to the races.
And then from that moment, things did spiral really fast.
Like I would say that from like a few days after she introduced cocaine into her system, the Rhea who I knew was gone.
We'll be right back.
Thank you.
You get the sense of both how.
I don't want to say it was slow moving, but this build towards this intense love and safety between the two of you was more than a decade in the making, correct?
And then at the same time, it sort of it does feel like it veers so quickly which you keep speaking about.
Having this feeling like this is so sudden.
How did I get here?
And there is a part of this book that I would love for you to read that I think, kind of encapsulates how quickly things change got extremely bad and extremely dark.
Um, let me get it because we put a little, put a bookmark in here.
This is the moment that you're speaking about, where raya is in serious pain.
She is back using drugs which are helping to provide for her.
Um, and you feel like you're out of options.
You feel very desperate.
You write it was july of 2017 that i came up with a really good idea for what would save me from the nightmare i was now trapped in with raya.
Can you keep reading from page 240.
Is that okay?
Okay.
Let's see.
And at that point, too, remember that she's a hospice patient.
So, like, what kind of intervention are you going to have with a hospice patient?
Because you can't say if you keep doing drugs at this level, it's going to kill you.
Right.
Because it gave her a blank.
In a weird way, her death sentence gave her this blank check to just use whatever she was using.
And she'd become really abusive.
Yeah.
And I felt like I had no way out.
She has to die now, said my exhausted mind, and suddenly this seemed like a terrific solution.
After all, Rhea was dying already anyway, right?
I just needed to move the process along before things got even worse, before she set the whole building on fire with a dropped cigarette or got us both arrested.
She had to die, and I was the one who had to kill her.
I decided I would do it the next day.
I went to sleep that night in peace, knowing that liberation was finally in sight.
I also hadn't slept for weeks at this point because people on cocaine don't sleep.
So she was keeping me awake.
I want to make something extremely clear here.
When I say that I once planned to murder Rhea, I don't mean the idea simply crossed my mind that my life would be easier if she were gone.
I mean that I fully intended to kill her.
And I tell this story in all its raw honesty because I want people to understand how insane codependency can make a person become.
I mean, I'm the nice lady who wrote Eat, Pray, Love.
And I came very close to premeditatedly and cold-bloodedly murdering my partner because she had taken her affection away from me and because I was extremely tired.
That's the sort of person I become when I'm in my insanity.
I mean, you wrote these words.
You've read them many times.
But can I ask you what it feels like to read them?
You know, I get.
The thing I feel is a feeling.
I had a lot when I was writing this book, which is, first of all, I'm writing it from the privileged position of it's over, you know and, And this didn't happen.
You did not.
And I didn't kill her.
Oh, yes.
And...
And the privileged position of healing not just the trauma of this circumstance but the trauma that led me to become the kind of person who would give my life away to anybody who maybe might take care of me for a minute.
And the privilege of sitting on the other side of six years of sobriety and recovery and working a program in Codependence Anonymous and like all of these things that I've done.
So I'm sitting pretty comfortably here right now.
And we're just trying to survive what had become this firestorm of trauma.
And that was what we call in the rooms my best thinking on that day.
And what Rhea was doing was her best thinking on that day.
That's what we were down to.
This is our best idea.
Yeah.
You know, Rhea's best idea was like I'm just going to lock myself in the bathroom with thousands of dollars of cocaine and opioids and fentanyl and steroids.
And I'm just going to try to get my levels right so that I'm just checked out enough that I don't have to think about the fact that I'm dying or be in pain but not so checked out that I overdose.
Or that literally I couldn't leave her because I was literally afraid she was going to burn the building down, because she kept falling asleep with cigarettes in her hands all over the furniture.
It's so scary.
It was so out of control.
The only thing anyone is ever trying to do is get through the day.
Like you can take a pretty good guess when you look at literally anyone doing literally anything that, first of all, what they're doing is what they think is a really good idea.
Yeah, they're best thinking.
And they did not wake up that morning saying, how can I be the worst possible version of myself?
Like, no, they woke up being like, how am I going to make it through another day?
And the thing that was so sacred about that moment that I just read was that...
I was able to see, oh, people really are capable of anything.
Like, if I'm capable of murder, anybody is.
The person who would apologize to a mugger, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Do you see love between the two of you in that passage?
I mean, we just spoke so much about No, not in that moment.
No, I mean, Rhea certainly wasn't loving me in that moment or herself.
I mean she like sober Rhea.
If she had seen herself at that point would have been like bitch, kill her.
Like, for sure.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah, yeah.
For sure.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know, like, she would have been like, dude, like, don't let that continue.
You know, like, totally get it.
That's so funny.
For sure, that was the version of herself she hated the most.
Yeah, that she'd worked really hard to not be and then towards the end it became.
She would have been like five years earlier than that.
Rhea fast-forwarding, seeing herself shooting up in a bathroom would have been.
It would have destroyed her.
And being unkind to someone she loves.
Yeah, using people, using drugs, using like she would have hated it.
And five years earlier version of me, seeing me in this scene of total degradation, when I thought I had gotten my life completely together.
And yet that's where we ended up.
And, you know, they say of addiction, it never rests, it only waits.
You know, and when the circumstances were right, this thing waited in her and then arose.
And when the circumstances were right for me to lose all the work that I had done and become again a child begging for someone to take care of them even though they couldn't, I did that.
Yeah.
I mean, we mentioned and it's important to say you did not go through with the murder plan.
Yes, just to be clear, police, I didn't kill her.
Should we say, because it actually is sort of darkly funny what happens next.
Can you share what?
Well, what happened next is that same Rhea, who could read the room always and who could smell bullshit, and who had survived for years on the streets and survived in prisons and had survived like she was such a survivor.
Right.
I mean, literally, that's what I was intending to do.
I know you mean that.
Literally, I'm looking you in the eyes right now, and I'm like, Really?
Literally?
But you really do mean literally.
Like it's not... This is not at all figurative.
This was a plan.
And sleep deprived, yes.
Like going through like immense stress.
It was a nightmare.
I mean, it's... And it's...
I don't even need to justify it.
I was about to say it's unjustifiable, but it's the reality of where I was in that moment.
It was the only thing I could think of that I was like, this is the only way this is going to end.
Like, one of us has to die.
And I also was like, no, she would approve of this.
Yeah.
But then I'm still not sure it's totally wrong.
But anyway, she she looked up at me from the apartment.
I walk in the apartment and she looked up at me from this table, the coffee table.
It was like, covered with these fat rails of cocaine and like clouds of cigarette smoke, bottle of whiskey, like piles of pills that she was sorting.
And she just looked at me.
And all of a sudden focused.
You know, like all of a sudden, it's like all that dropped and like her keen eyes came back and no one could focus.
Like when Rhea put her attention on you, you knew that it was on you.
And she looked at me and said, don't you start plotting against me now, Liz.
And I was like, what are you, a witch?
Yeah.
That is pretty wild.
It was so great, you know, and we just held each other's gaze and time seemed to stop.
And it felt like somebody had pushed a pause button on this insane drama that we were in.
And then she said, think very carefully about what you're about to do.
And it felt like I actually just got chills saying it again, because it felt like a moment of divine salvation, of like, how far are you gonna take this?
How far are you, Liz, gonna take this?
I'll show you how far I, Rhea, am gonna take this.
I'm gonna take this all the way down to the cellar of myself.
But like, are you sure you wanna do what you're about to do?
And I just walked out of the apartment and wandered around as though I had a head injury for a few hours, like so bewildered.
And then I thought my second best thinking, which was like oh, I've got all these fentanyl patches and pills, I'll just kill myself.
Because...
Oh my gosh.
So because it was like when I said one of us has to die, I meant it.
Whoa.
Right?
That's how degraded my spirit had become.
Like one of us has to die.
And obviously she wasn't going to let me go.
She was not letting you.
Oh my gosh.
And also there was a moment with Rhea where I was like, who do I think I am that I could kill Rhea?
Like she was so tough.
No.
Yeah.
And then I was like, okay, well then I'll kill me.
And then, in that moment was when This voice came to me, and I had heard this voice before in my life, and I call this voice God.
Some people would call it higher power intuition, the Tao, like maybe it's ancestors, who knows, but like some spirit guide angel, whatever.
Like a voice came to me in that moment and said if you have reached a point in your life where you are seriously contemplating murdering another person or yourself, it's quite likely that you have reached the end of your power.
And that being the case, maybe you should call somebody and ask for help.
This is what I remember.
Which was never an idea that had occurred to me.
Never an idea that had occurred.
We're trained as children that help is not available.
And so when you're trained that no one's coming, you just get to become this thing that they another term for it is toxic self-reliance.
Like another translation of that is I got this.
I'll handle it.
Because I've always had to got this, right?
So Rhea had that and I had that.
So she was doing toxic self-reliance by being like I'll handle this by just using substances the way that I know how.
I was doing toxic self-reliance by like, if I can't control this entire situation, then somebody has to die.
And in that moment, it was like, oh, there's other people on the planet.
And the thing about falling so deeply into somebody, at the level of infatuation that I had with Rhea, was like what I want when I'm doing that is for there to be no other people on the planet.
Like, I want to disappear into somebody because I'm uncomfortable in myself.
And so I want to not have to exist anymore. and I want there to be no one else either.
So it's just called, like, planet them.
I'm just going to disappear into planet them.
And I'd been so sucked into that with her that it would have never occurred to me to ask for help.
This is the scene I remember, and I was so struck by.
You're in the park, right, and you just call person after person after person.
Yeah.
What did it feel like?
Because in doing so, of course, you're asking for help, but you're also admitting...
Sort of the depths to which you and her and the two of you had sunk.
I mean, you write in this excerpt, you're like, I'm the nice lady that wrote Eat, Pray, Love.
Did it feel like?
Did you recognize yourself sitting there on that park bench, making those calls, admitting where you were?
Yeah, and that was also part of it, which is like I've been this degraded before and I thought I wasn't that person anymore.
What was it about this time that was so?
It wasn't that this time was different, it's that this time was exactly the same.
Well, you know like where it's like oh, once again i have completely lost myself to somebody and once again i'm like shattered, and and once again the person who i thought was going to save me ended up destroying my heart, and i don't even know who i am anymore.
And if it had been the first time, Or even the third?
Yeah.
Or even the fifth.
Do you know the number?
I mean, I'll tell you this.
I'll tell you that, as low, what we call the low bottom addict is somebody where the consequences of their usage is huge.
As much of a low bottom addict as Rhea was as a drug addict, I am a low bottom sex and love addict.
Like this is how I, this is how I hurt myself.
And so I think that part of the sort of cascading horror of that was like no no no no no no, no.
I fixed my life.
I was on Oprah.
I'm an expert.
And that is the moment where you first went to the first 12-step meetings that you've been to right.
Yeah.
I got 12-stepped by a friend who, I mean, I was calling to have people tell me what to do about Rhea.
Right.
But I had somehow in me the good sense to call people who have had involvement with addiction, whether their own or the addictions of others.
And so there were some people who had some good recovery on those phone calls.
And they gave me some very good guidance.
And it was all about me.
None of it was about her.
I'm like no.
Did you know though, about the thousands of dollars of cocaine and the fentanyl patches?
And like the teenagers coming into our apartment day and night with like piles of drugs.
Like, how do we stop that?
You know, and they all were like, what are you going to do to take care of you?
And I'm like, but did you hear how she's a cancer patient in hospice?
You know, like, I can't take care of me.
Like, I'm holding the world together.
So anyway, a couple people said go to Al-Anon.
And then one person said, you know, I've watched you now for 25 years do this to yourself.
And There's a program for people like you, for people with love addiction.
There's programs for people with sex addiction.
There's programs for people with codependency issues.
And I think the problem might be bigger than Rhea.
And maybe you need to think about that.
And that was both insulting and maybe revelatory.
So clarifying.
It sounds like both.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You begin your recovery with In that moment or not in that moment, but you begin going to meetings.
That day.
You went to a meeting that day.
Yeah.
Oh, you do not waste time.
It was that or I was going to die.
Stay with us.
You move out.
What's happening with Rhea during this time?
So other people moved in, you know, and she was using really hard.
She was also in her own way trying to rein it in.
There were people trying to help her.
There were also people doing drugs with her.
There were people trying to help her and do drugs with her.
You know like messy, complicated people.
But she ended up calling an ex of hers who had over the years become one of her best friends, like a family person, and just said Stacy, I'm in trouble and I need help.
And Stacy...
It was amazing.
Stacey was like if you can get yourself to Detroit without getting arrested or dying, I will help you, but it will be on my terms and there won't be any of this stuff that you're doing.
We're going to get you off all of these other drugs and get you back into proper medical care.
And she actually did.
I mean in that it's remarkable to read about that turn because it allowed you to be with Rhea when she passed.
Yeah, she came out of it.
I mean I never again going to how little I can control or understand the world.
I was like Stacy, that's not going to work.
And Stacy's like, I think it will.
And it...
And it did.
And we got her back.
Like she came back not the full Rhea, but like for somebody who had a couple months to live pretty much in her own character and identity again.
Before when you thought about her passing, you described it like my God would die.
Yeah.
What was it actually like when she left?
My God died.
Okay.
Yeah, but my God had died before she died.
That was why it was so disorienting, because I lost my God when she picked up cocaine and stopped being my hero.
And that was where the trauma was for me.
I was kind of ready for her to die, but I wasn't ready for her to leave before she died.
And that was where the wounding was in me.
And the wounding was also the great disorientation of like, wait, who was this person?
Right.
Was she this really strong, fierce, powerful, loving, protective kind of dragon?
Or was she this degraded, using, manipulative, lying junkie?
And the answer was yes.
Yes.
And I don't like that answer because I want a black and white answer.
And there isn't one.
And also, who am I?
Am I this good, loving, generous, helpful, encouraging, peaceful, God-loving, yogic, creative muse?
Or am I this deeply manipulative person?
Um, like controlling, uh, clingy, needy, desperate love addict.
And the answer is yes.
Um, and I don't like that answer either, you know, because the thing that I don't want to be is human, and the thing I don't want anybody else to be is human.
And yet here we are.
Here we are burping into the mic.
Here we are burping into the mic.
I want to burp so you know you're not alone in the burp.
I'm going to do it just so you're comfortable.
Just so you feel like you're not alone.
I will be with you.
I need to work on, baby.
I mean, it is also true, you know, and I appreciate this about the book.
It's not like Rhea passes and then you figure out you're in recovery, you know, and you're sober.
It took a very long time.
I stopped going to recovery after Rhea passed.
So I went for a while to some 12-step rooms.
But when she got—I mean, and here's my codependency.
When she got well meaning, sober enough to be herself again— then I'm like well, I don't need to go to any 12-step rooms because the person who was the problem in my life is no longer a problem.
That's sort of what I mean by like your God dying.
But yeah, that's not how it works.
Not even a little.
Like I am my own problem.
Yeah.
Like I am the consistent problem through my 35-year uninterrupted run of relationships where I was constantly trying to find somebody who would.
I'm the problem here, right.
So I wasn't dealing with that.
And I had to go out and do all the things I do.
Well, I'm going to feel better by overachieving.
I'll write a novel in three months.
I'm going to feel better by traveling.
I'm going to go to India.
I'm going to feel better by falling in love with somebody else.
I'm going to impale myself on someone and Who would like to volunteer to be the next person that I take hostage with my loving generosity and kindness.
Who would like to volunteer to be the next person who I try to control into submission, so that you will then give me lava right?
So I did all those things again that I've always done, and all of those things didn't work.
And I bottomed out again.
And it was only then where I was like, oh, here we are back on the bathroom floor in tears.
Here we are.
And there gets to be a weariness.
You know what I mean?
Even for my readers, it's like, do we really want to see Liz on the bathroom floor in tears again?
I'm like, I'm there with you, girl.
And we get tired of ourselves.
It's just like, I can't even stand this story anymore.
You know, you write about your sober life now going on how many years of sobriety?
Six years.
Six years.
Yeah.
What does that look like?
Yeah, what does sober life look like?
So for me and it's a sober—sobriety looks differently for different people who are in the programs that I go to.
But for me, sobriety is any day where I'm not using someone.
And that doesn't just have to be a lover or partner.
Like, that's anybody.
And using somebody to change my internal chemistry—
So I don't like the way I'm feeling.
I'm uncomfortable in the world.
I'm going to manipulate a reaction out of you about me so that I can feel better.
So now we cut the middleman out.
I do that a little.
Just a tiny bit, right?
So it's like this is – I know what I do.
I know my shit.
I know my bullshit.
And so any day where I'm not doing that is a sober day where I'm not intriguing with anybody anymore.
And intriguing is like planting seeds of maybe, right?
Yeah.
Where it's like, I'm going to keep this person a little bit on the hook.
I'm going to keep this person a little bit on the hook.
Yeah, they're married now.
I'll keep that person on the hook.
So any day where I'm not flirting, because flirting for me is not safe.
And other people can flirt.
You know, just like alcoholics can't drink.
Yeah.
I can't flirt.
Wow.
How do you stop?
Flirting is I catch it and I'm like, you're doing it.
And then I leave this.
And a friend who's a drug addict, who was at a drug addict recovery, was at a nightclub and texted her sponsor and said, like I'm having so much fun but people are doing exorcisms.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And her sponsor said, collect your purse and leave the premises.
Right.
So I was like, like, if I'm in a situation where I'm like, ooh, I'm doing that thing that I do.
It's like, girlfriend, collect your purse and leave the premises.
You'll literally leave the party.
I will leave the room.
You know, I will leave the room.
Wow.
And it's like, go talk to somebody you're not attracted to right now.
Hmm.
Like oh, there's kids here at this barbecue.
Go hang out with the kids.
Yeah yeah yeah like, and and that may sound like i'm denying myself, but usually the people that i'm attracted to are not available like, so it's like this is actually beneficial for everybody.
Whoa right, it's like.
This is somebody's spouse.
This is somebody's partner.
Yeah, this is somebody.
This is not harmless at all for you to be doing this like.
You don't belong in this conversation that you're in right now.
It's not safe for anybody.
Does this after... Is there a recent instance where you did this?
Does this still come up in you or is the impulse to flirt?
I'm less and less interested in it because I'm not...
Listen, I'm always going to be a sex and love addict, just like Raya was always going to be a drug addict.
And one of the things that I really learned like right up, front and personal and close with Raya, because I got to see it was what it looks like when an addict decides they're not an addict anymore.
So like that example was such a gift that she gave to me where it's like, I don't fuck with this.
Like, I'm a sex and love addict.
I will die a sex and love addict.
I will hopefully die a sober sex and love addict.
I got so angry when I first came into recovery when I found out that the cure for my thing is that you have to learn how to love and take care of yourself.
Well, that's how I was thinking the world.
I was like, ew.
First of all, like, the whole reason I'm like this is because...
I wasn't getting the care and love that I needed at a very tender age, right?
So it's like, I've been told since the day I was born to take care of myself.
So fuck you.
You know like I want somebody to take care of me and I'll take care of you if you take care of me, right?
So, but the remedy is to learn how to make a life that is so rich and anchored and grounded and full that I'm not out here like a beggar trying to get that from somebody.
So I meditate and I pray and I turn over things with my fellows in recovery.
And what's happened is that, although I started doing those things resentfully, what I've now seen is like oh wait, when I do all of these things that make me be well, my life is so good that I don't actually want to bring anybody into it.
I don't want to bring at this moment, just for today.
I don't want to.
The amount of myself that I want to give away or compromise on or sacrifice is zero.
I love my life.
I don't want anyone living in here with me.
I don't want anybody, like, I don't want, like, no.
Like, I'm good.
I don't want to ask anyone's permission to go traveling.
I don't want to, I just want to, no.
I don't want to share that.
You want to share a bed?
No, I don't want to share a bed.
Like not today.
I don't want that today.
I don't know about tomorrow, but like just for today, I'm like, oh, this is a weird feeling.
I'm good.
I do notice you keep saying today.
So is that sort of not excluding the possibility that you might want partnership or a relationship in the future?
Yeah.
The future's a really dangerous neighborhood for me to hang out in with a mind like mine.
Like, instantly, if I start thinking about the future, I'm going to go into neurosis.
Whoa.
Instantly.
I mean, start thinking about the future.
Right?
Yeah.
There's some things that I'm looking forward to.
There's some things I'm not.
Right?
Like the future's a really scary neighborhood and I can go into fantasy when I think about the future.
I can go into fear when I think about the future, and those are really bad mental states for me.
So I'm better off just being like, right in this moment, my needs are met.
I'm well.
I'm not...
I'm not up on my bullshit right now.
I'm not intriguing with anybody.
I'm not infatuated with anybody.
I'm not obsessed with anybody.
I'm not in withdrawal from anybody.
I'm not running away from anyone.
I'm not running toward anyone.
By all rights.
That's what a person like me should be doing.
Today is one of those things, because that's what I've done my whole life.
So if I just get to have a day like for me, like a victorious day, is just like I slept well last night.
I woke up.
I was hanging out with my dog.
I prayed.
I meditated.
My life isn't unmanageable.
Like my bills are paid and I'm not paying anyone else's bills.
That's a big one for me.
That's a big one for you.
Big one, right?
I just get to have a day.
I just get to have a day.
That is a fucking miracle.
You're making me feel happy.
Fucking miracle.
Yeah.
So, like, next year's next year's problem.
You know, just for today, it's good.
Just for today.
And that's just good.
I'm happy with that. this addiction to validation from other people, from lovers.
You gave so much of yourselves to them.
It's how you understood your worth.
I'm also thinking about how much of yourself you give to your readers, your audience.
And I'm wondering if how you think about your relationship to your audience has changed in this new sober life.
Does that question make sense?
Mm-hmm.
I don't feel like my readers owe me anything, and I don't feel like I owe them anything.
It's the opposite of a codependent relationship.
Wow.
I actually just feel like, hey, guys, I did a thing.
Yeah.
If you would like to be part of this thing, you're welcome to come along, and if not, my feelings won't be hurt.
And the one thing that I feel like with this book that I feel like is slightly different in terms of the—that feels very recovery to me—.
Is that just last week I sent an email out to my publishers here and overseas and to my agent and all the people involved in the production of this book.
And I just said, hey, listen, I have worked so hard for my serenity and I have it.
Yeah.
Just for today.
My life is really serene.
In the interest of safeguarding that precious, priceless serenity, I don't need to hear about any reviews.
Yeah.
Wow.
I love that.
Yes.
Not the good ones or the bad ones.
I've worked so hard to not look into your eyes to see if I'm okay and to not take a survey.
We call it a monkey survey.
My friends and I call it a monkey survey, like asking all the monkeys in the room if they approve of me.
Yeah.
I've worked so hard to not do that, that with this book especially.
I think it's really important to not be asking the world is it okay that I wrote this book?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I want to end on something Rhea said.
I feel like it goes along with what you're sharing.
You quote her as saying, the truth has legs.
It always stands.
What is one truth that stands for you at the end of all of this?
Hmm.
I will never be happy unless I take complete self accountability for my own life.
And I can trick myself into thinking that somebody else is accountable for my life or should be.
And my life and the universe have given me lots of opportunities to try to make other people accountable for my life.
Like, just, oh yeah, go try that.
Go try that with someone else.
Go try it with someone else.
Go try it with someone else.
But for the first time in my life, for these last six years, I have become a responsible steward of my own life.
And that feels...
Really beautiful.
And I don't think happiness is going to be available to me if I'm not doing that.
Nothing short of that is going to make me happy.
This is actually my real final question.
Raya was your hairdresser.
What would you say about the hair now?
Oh my God, she would hate it.
I almost did this.
I love it.
I mean, what's your hair care routine now?
I shave my head.
I have clippers and I clip my head once a week.
I think it looks great, by the way.
Thank you.
I love it.
Oh, my God.
The fact that I love it is also very important because a lot of people don't.
Really?
But I do.
I do remember there was one commenter you talked about who said, why are you bald, though?
Why do you want to be bald, though?
Maybe because it's like so— Why you want to be bald, though?
I am—this is a whole radical new transformation of consciousness for me, where it's like oh wait a minute.
I don't—I am not for you.
Yeah.
Like, I do not exist as a thing for you to want to look at.
I know, but you look great.
You look like you have a great head shape.
And that's—we can talk about this offline, but I'm worried about my own head shape, so I really admire you.
We're going to talk about this right now.
Okay.
Because this is extremely important.
Please.
I think I have a bump.
I didn't do this for years because I was like, I don't have the right shaped head.
And that stopped me from doing this for a long time.
And then when I did it, I was like, I actually really love this.
My hand's perfect.
I actually really love this.
Someone give me the clippers now.
Give me the clippers.
Let's go to the bathroom in the New York Times building.
It's so good.
And all I want is to be free.
And I don't want to... Nothing about the way that I present myself anymore is like...
And you know there's a line.
It's in Eat Pray, Love.
They even put it in the movie.
It was in the book and the movie where a friend said to me this should have been a warning 20 years ago, 25 years ago they were like hey Liz, you know how some people start to look like their dogs.
Yeah.
You always look like whoever you're dating.
Because I would change my entire way I dressed, my entire way I looked, like...
And I it took me all these years to be like, what do I like?
Like, how do I like to dress?
Yeah.
And how do I like my hair?
And and it's like, wait, I actually don't want to ever wear makeup again, like ever.
But I want to wear a ton of bracelets and have a shaved head.
Apparently, this is what I like.
The look is working.
Thank you.
Again, not that you care what I think because no lava, whatever.
But I'm just telling you, the look is working.
All right.
So I'm serious about the next time you send me.
I don't know when you'll see me again, but it's like.
So satisfying.
Please go, Britt.
Thank you.
See you next time.
See you next time.
Bye.
The Modern Love team is Amy Pearl, Christina Josa Davis Land, Elisa Gutierrez, Emily Lang, Jen Poyant, Lynn Levy, Reva Goldberg and Sarah Curtis.
This episode was produced by Amy Pearl and Sarah Curtis.
It was edited by Davis Land, Lynn Levy, and Jen Poyant.
Daniel Ramirez was our mix engineer and we got studio support from Maddie Maciello and Nick Pittman.
The Modern Love theme music is by Dan Powell.
Original music in this episode by Pat McCusker, Alicia B. Etoupe, Dan Powell, and Rowan Nemisto.
The Modern Love column is edited by Daniel Jones.
Mia Lee is the editor of Modern Love Projects.
If you'd like to submit an essay or a tiny love story to The New York Times.
The instructions are always in our show notes.
I'm Anna Martin.
Thanks for listening.
Bye.
