ENJOYING LIFE AGAIN:
Elizabeth Gilbert’s new lover and new novel
After Elizabeth Gilbert’s partner died last year, the Eat Pray Love author buried herself in work to alleviate the pain. Now she has emerged with a new novel and a new lover – both, she tells Genevieve Gannon, are celebrations of the precious joy of pleasure and life lived to the full.
There was a moment in 2016 when a trapdoor opened in the bottom of Elizabeth Gilbert’s heart and she felt as though her entire existence was falling through the hole. She had just received a phone call and learnt that her best friend, Rayya Elias, was dying. “As soon as that phone call came, my entire life changed, almost instantly,” Liz says. “I left my marriage. I came to be with her in a romantic way. Some things were made very clear as soon as I knew I was going to lose her. It was the most obvious thing I had ever experienced in my life.”
Liz “blew up” her life and went to Rayya’s side. She dropped the novel she had spent the past few months researching and ended her marriage. She wrote a lengthy explanation to her readers and followers on social media. “Death – or
the prospect of death – has a way of clearing away everything that is not real, and in that space of stark and utter realness, I was faced with this truth: I do not merely love Rayya; I am in love with Rayya,” she wrote.
“Literally every single bit of my life had to dramatically change in order to honestly be able to express what she was to me, and to be with her for whatever time we had left,” the softly-spoken American writer, now 49, tells The Weekly.
Followers of Liz’s work who looked back on her career would have noticed that, as Liz underwent a metamorphosis from New York journalist and critically acclaimed mid-list author to the global best-selling phenomenon she is today, Rayya had always been there.
In 2010, when the film adaptation of Eat Pray Love premiered in New York,
Rayya was there. A moment captured before the red carpet shows Liz with her blond hair swept up and her arms wrapped tightly around her friend. The one-shouldered, pink and white Oscar de la Renta gown Liz is draped in accentuates her long neck. Nestled in this swan-like embrace is Rayya, with her pixie haircut, smiling proudly in the orange polo shirt she had worn to do Liz’s hair and make-up for the event.
Months later Rayya is there again, in London this time. Dressed in black and silver, with delicate netting covering her décolletage, Liz shares the backseat of a limo with her best friend, who’s dressed in a characteristically punk take on black tie attire, en route to the film’s UK premiere.
The last time The Weekly interviewed Liz was in 2010 after the self-proclaimed marriage sceptic “made peace” with the institution. She was reflecting on her wedding to her then partner, Jose Nunes. Liz had met Jose in Bali in a moment of kismet that gave her a Hollywood ending for her monster hit, Eat Pray Love. Though they were very much in love, they were also both survivors of bitter divorces and the prospect of another marriage struck them both as “intrusive and frightening”. Yet complications with
Jose’s US visa forced their hands and The Weekly ran a story on their cosy nuptials in the provincial American hamlet of Frenchtown. Beside the photo of Liz in country knitwear and sturdy boots, there’s a tiny footnote: Hair and make-up by Rayya Elias.
Rayya, a Syrian-born, Detroit-raised musician and writer, was always there. “She had this enormous, capacious, generous heart,” Liz once said of her friend-turned-love.
In 2015, Liz and Rayya appeared together on the stage of the Sydney Opera House and were featured on the front cover of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Spectrum with the headline, “Words with Friends”, which at the time characterised their platonic passion for words and each other perfectly. Liz was once again on The New York Times bestseller list with her book on creativity, Big Magic, and soon after, she began voraciously researching her next novel about promiscuous New York showgirls. Life was good and she was relishing getting stuck into her new project about women and sex and theatre. “I just thought, God, I want to play in that world. It was impossibly glamorous and sharp and vivid,” Liz says.
She was reading books by Alexander Woollcott, a theatre critic and Algonquin Round Table writer, and reliving sensual nights with former showgirls, including one who had a fling with John Wayne. Her days were spent running around the New York streets where all of these people had lived and worked, “trying to get a sense for the time”. The world of creaky old playhouses, and sequinned costumes was coming alive in her mind. Then came the phone call that brought everything to a core-shaking halt. Rayya was dying, and the trapdoor in Liz’s heart fell open.
“Only this mattered,” she says. She ran open-heartedly into this revelatory love. However, the prospect for their future was grim. Rayya had cancer in her liver and pancreas. There was no cure and Liz knew she was leaving her work and her marriage, not to begin a new life with a new partner, but to shepherd her closest companion into the next. She would walk with Rayya “to the edge of the river”.
She wrote at the time: “The thought of someday sitting in a hospital room with her, holding her hand and watching her slide away, without ever having let her (or myself!) know the extent of my true feelings for her ... well, that thought was unthinkable.”
The care of Rayya became Liz’s sole purpose. The author, who had achieved near-unparalleled fame by exorcising her
“She was my love, my heart, my best friend, my teacher, my rebel ...”
pain through words, put her pen and paper away. “The last thing in the world I cared about was a novel about frivolous showgirls in New York City. I just couldn’t imagine ever writing that book,” she says. “It just seemed insane.”
As Rayya’s illness progressed, Liz kept the lines of communication open with her supporters.
“Dear Ones,” she would write, to fill them in on her thoughts and reflections. Dear Ones is how she addresses her million-plus loyal followers, with whom she converses regularly. Her tone is intimate and personal, as if speaking privately to a co-conspirator.
“Dear Ones,” she wrote in June 2017, “Rayya Elias and I have been through some really difficult days together – but not today.” The pair had held an intimate ceremony to celebrate their commitment to each other. Liz wore a white dress, Rayya a shirt and waistcoat. “Today was precious and perfect,” Liz wrote. Grave days lay ahead, she knew, but Rayya wasn’t going softly into the night. On The Moth podcast, Liz gave a glimpse into what it was like to live through Rayya’s decline. She talked of watching her “tough, strong, hot, phenomenon of a human being” become physically weak. “She’s gotten so thin. I can feel her little bones through my sweater and my heart is breaking,” Liz said. But through it all, Rayya never changed. “Rayya managed to remain the apex predator,” Liz said. She didn’t want to talk to bereavement counsellors, she wanted to watch football. She didn’t want organic health foods, she wanted Oreos and cigarettes. “Dear Ones,” Liz wrote in January 2018. “She was my love, my heart, my best friend, my teacher, my rebel, my angel ...” Rayya never liked peace, Liz wrote, heartbroken. “Rest in excitement,” she told her love.
Ever the chronicler of the human condition, Liz continued, after
Rayya’s death, to communicate with her readers, but her suffering was clear. She wrote spiritual musings and emphasised positive thinking, growth and reflection. Glimpses of her desolation shone through. She shared a poem by Tricia Elliott: “You have felt this small, a lone heart pounding in the darkness.”
Behind the scenes, she was undergoing her own form of therapy. Liz Gilbert, whose most commercially successful book sold in excess of 12 million copies, had returned to writing with feverish devotion. She silenced her whirring mind by keeping it busy, and plunged into the world of 1940s America.
She emerged, to the surprise and delight of all around her, with a new, joyous novel about dancers, decadence and sex. City of Girls was a vacation from mourning, she says. She wrote it as a gift to herself.
“It was healing,” she says of those cloistered months. “What I needed was to counter-balance all the sense of loss and darkness with something carbonated and fizzy and to write about brainless young people doing dumb things and frivolity,” she laughs. “It was a way of bringing myself out of grief. I really feel it was the right choice for me to do it that way, rather than doing the more obvious thing of writing a book or a memoir about Rayya,” she says. “I somehow had the good sense to know that, at that moment, that would just deepen my pain. I wanted to cheer myself up and enjoyed the idea of, when the book is published, offering it to my readers and the world as a gift to anyone who needed cheering up.”
She does not pretend it wasn’t a dark and difficult time, but says she is grateful that through “the generosity of the universe” she had something to immerse herself in, as she dealt with her pain. And as the pages piled up, the work soothed her. “Creativity to me is the antidote to depression and the antidote to despair,” she says.
“My mind certainly had a lot of painful thoughts in it after Rayya’s death. It was certainly something that had to be sat with and it was sat with but ... the best definition I’ve ever heard of despair is that it’s the false belief that tomorrow is going to be exactly the same as today. And that’s where people fall into stagnation and into real mental pain – with this idea that it’s never going to change. The novel changed every day, the story changed every day and with it I got to see my own change, my own healing.”
Each night, she would call her friend Sheryl Moller and read her day’s work over the phone. Ardent fans of Liz might recall Sheryl from Eat Pray Love. She had guided Liz through pain before, telling her, when her first marriage was in its death throes, to be honest with herself and the world. “I would recommend a great, bold act of creativity to anybody who’s in despair as a counterweight to that because it’s also an act of vitality and that’s the opposite of despair as well,” Liz says. Her friend’s encouragement and excitement at hearing the story
kept Liz moving forward. “I really did feel it was a tremendous gift that I was able to have something to do that was completely mind-absorbing but also had a spirit in it that was very life-affirming,” she says.
If there was one thing she had learnt during her last days with Rayya, it was that, though the prospect of death might weaken someone physically, it doesn’t change who they are. As the cancer continued to eat away at Rayya, her life became about finding what pleasure and joy she could, and preserving what she could of herself. With this in mind, losing her kindred spirit strengthened Liz’s resolve to press on.
“The book is about many things but I think one of the primary things it’s about is engaging with your life at the highest, to involve yourself in your own life, and not miss the chance to be alive. It was never more urgent than at that moment to tell that story.”
This is a realisation Liz has been coming to her whole life.
“I grew up in a culture that was suspicious of beauty and natural beauty,” Liz says. Raised on a Christmas tree farm in Connecticut in a strict, Anglo-Protestant family, she was taught that responsibility and productivity were more important than pleasure or beauty. Her family was full of humour and her paternal grandmother, in particular, had a wicked, Dorothy Parker-esque wit, but their values were undeniably puritanical.
“You were allowed to get pleasure from a job well done,” Liz laughs. “Pleasures were things that you were allowed after a very hard day’s work. And yet, these delights of the world, these delights of the flesh, these delights of the aesthetic are what it should mean to have a full human life. I want to really celebrate that with this book.”
In particular, she wanted to write something freeing about women’s sexuality. When asked if the book she started planning years ago was very different from the final story, which came after so much change in her own life, she laughs: “Weirdly, no.”
“I’ve had in my mind, for a very long while, the desire to write a book about women who are promiscuous and whose lives are not destroyed by it,” Liz says. That character, she insists, is largely missing from the annals of Western culture. “A woman can spend a season of her life, or indeed her entire life, pursuing sensual pleasure ... without being ground under the wheels of the train or being cast out of society, or dying of an overdose in the gutter.
“His heart has been such a warm place for me to land.”
“The wages of sin are really truly death in the western novel. There’s no end to these cautionary tales. Yet, in my life and the life of most of the female friends I have, that’s not the story. It doesn’t mean that we’ve sailed through our sexual experimentations or love stories without being harmed, or without being hurt. But it does mean that we’re a great deal more resilient than traditional novels would have you think we are. Many of us look back on those times as wonderful, if not consequence-free parts of our lives. I wanted to write a very rich and whole story about that.”
The result is a portal to another world full of boisterous episodes that, Liz hopes, can bring pleasure to those who need it. “Certainly this is a moment of near universal anxiety,”
Liz says. “It’s a stressful moment in history for a lot of people.”
It has been a long and winding journey of discovery from the lost woman her readers met in the opening pages of Eat Pray Love, lying sobbing on the bathroom floor, to the author who faced the most crushing grief of her life with a steady gaze. She has learned that when spreading kindness to others it is important not to overlook one’s self, and this is something she urges her readers and fans the world over to do.
In a nice postscript to the story, Liz made an unexpected announcement on social media a few days after her interview with The Weekly. “Dear Ones, I am in love,” she began. It was a bright spring day in her corner of the world and everything she saw was making her think of rebirth and renewal. The photo (shown left) accompanying the caption was of Liz smiling in the arms of photographer Simon MacArthur, a long-time friend of both Rayya’s and hers. He nuzzled her hair, looking aglow with happiness, as she was. “His heart,” she wrote, “has been such a warm place for me to land.”
Liz promises that she will always share anything personal about her life that could help someone else to feel more comfortable about theirs, and this was such an instance.
The uncertainty that comes with loving after loss is normal, she wrote. “It’s okay. Let in love. Do not let your gorgeous loyalty to the deceased stop you from experiencing the marvels and terrors of your short, mortal, precious life.”