All the Way to the River: Oprah's Book Club: Love, Loss, and Liberation
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.
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.
BUY THE BOOK
Community Reviews
Wow - very moving and will make you reexamine your own life and your past relationships and habits and addictions.
All the Way to the River was my first autobiography, and I found it quietly confronting. Parts of Elizabeth’s codependency and people-pleasing made me uncomfortable because they reminded me of my younger self, which made the reading experience deeply reflective. What stayed with me most was its raw portrayal of illness and death — far from the peaceful image we often see in movies, it is shown as painful, real, and frightening. Rayya’s terminal illness, and its impact on Elizabeth, was especially moving. Not always an easy read, but certainly one that makes you pause and reflect.
I found this an odd one to critique to be honest as the story evolved it lost my intrigue and investment, which is a bit ignorant of me seeing as it is a true story!!
At the beginning I found it to be an eye opening honest, raw, unfiltered yet intentional and enlightening account of the deeply personal life of a complicated and toxic- beyond-words co-dependent relationship of 2 addicts.
Throughout,I swayed between thinking the book was beautifully poetic in the ways the author recalled that chapter of her life… being poignant and eloquent; and at other times I found it really flowery, fluffy and waffley.
The matter-of-factness and details about the addiction and how and what Liz did in aiding the drug buying etc due to her addiction became a little sterile, almost as if it was a detailed made up story (obviously it wasn’t) but the way it was retold made it so removed, it lacked sincerity… perhaps because it was constantly wild and extreme?
The journey of recovery after Rayya’s death was brutally honest and I’m glad that she was able to work on herself to find a new path. These chapters were particularly spiritual, in actual fact, the whole book was.
I’m left feeling a bit confused!
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