Dear Ones – 

If you were browsing People magazine earlier today then you already saw a very special announcement – but if not, I have big news.

I’ve written a new book, called ALL THE WAY TO THE RIVER, and it will be coming out this September.

In 2000, a friend sent me to see a new hairdresser named Rayya Elias. You all know my Rayya. Oh my goodness, it’s so easy for some of us to get lost in each other, isn’t it? Over the years, we became friends, then best friends, then inseparable. Then tragedy entered our lives, and we were forced to admit a deeper truth: we were in love. What we didn’t admit was that we were also a pair of addicts, on a collision course toward catastrophe.

I think at some point in our lives, all of us will face this extremely disorienting paradox — that you manage to get exactly what you've always wanted, perhaps even prayed for, and it nearly kills you. This book is about her. It is about me. It is about us. It is about you.

I have actually been trying to write a book about Rayya since the day she died, back in January 2018. I think it took me so long to tell our story because it took years of therapy, grief, confusion, recovery, and sobriety for me to even be able to understand all that had happened between us, and why. And while it was often harrowing to go back and relive that story, it was, in the end, incredibly healing to be able to come to peace with the past, and to feel that Rayya (who loved the truth more than anything) would have approved of this telling, too.

I wrote this book for myself — and for people who are seekers, people who are hungry, people who are restless, people who feel trapped, people who, perhaps, since earliest childhood have felt that there absolutely has to be a higher meaning to life than what we have been shown. That hunger leads many of us to become artists and travelers and spiritual explorers — which is wonderful. But it can also lead many of us into the blind alleys and dangerous dead-end highways of addiction, compulsion, and obsession. This book is about the darker side of that spiritual, emotional, and physical hunger — in its more extreme forms known as addiction — and how lost we can become in the endless search for connection and satisfaction. And it is about the pathway out of that desperation, through the liberation of a more nourishing way of life.

I hope reading it will set you free in the way that writing it did for me. I hope you hear Rayya in the text in the way that she has been speaking to me for years.  

If you want to preorder ALL THE WAY TO THE RIVER or learn more, please visit elizabethgilbert.com.  

Onward, 

LG