Eat, pray and leave your man for a woman
She turned her quest for happiness and a man into a blockbuster book and film. Imagine Elizabeth Gilbert’s fans’ surprise when she announced this week...
wouldn’t have made for quite such surefire Hollywood hit.
Rayya Elias, a punk rock-loving former convict and ex-drug addict, was born in Aleppo in 1960. She moved to Detroit with her family when she was eight.
A natural rebel, in 1983 she relocated to New York, where she had some success playing in a punk band and working as a hairdresser, before descending into drug addiction, homelessness and a jail term. Her drug addiction almost killed her, but she turned her life around and says she has been sober since 1997. She had an eight-year marriage to another woman, but they split up in 2008.
Of cleaning up her drug habit, she has said: ‘It’s funny, because after 12 rehabs and 23 detoxes and jail and institutions, I didn’t need to go anywhere. I just basically picked myself up, shook myself off and took about a week’s worth of Vicodin [a painkiller] just to get rid of the ache of withdrawing, started going to meetings and got clean.’
She and Gilbert met 15 years ago when Gilbert went to Elias for what she called a ‘hair intervention’ — that’s a haircut to you and me.
Elias still cuts it for Gilbert, but their relationship was so close that — long before this week’s lesbianism admission — friends of Elias would refer to Gilbert as her ‘wife’.
Until now, Elias has been living in a converted church owned by Gilbert in Milford, a town close to the writer’s New Jersey home. Gilbert initially allowed her to live there for free as long as her friend wrote her own memoir. Published in 2013, it is entitled Harley Loco: A Memoir Of Hard Living, Hair, And Post-Punk, From The Middle East To The Lower East Side.
In interviews together, they make clear that, although they make for an oddly-matched couple, Gilbert — with her far more wholesome background — finds that opposites attract when it comes to their relationship. Tellingly, even more than a year ago, they would describe their relationship as ‘love’.
Interviewed together in February 2015, the pair held hands and finished each others’ sentences as Elias fiddled with Gilbert’s hair. Describing their relationship, Gilbert said: ‘It’s not your sister, it’s not your lover, it’s not your BFF [Best Friend Forever]. There isn’t really an identifier for it.’
At the time, Gilbert made no secret of their inseparability. ‘I’d rather go to the laundromat with you than go to, like, Prague with almost anybody else,’ she told her foulmouthed punk amour.
‘I know it sounds like a love story and it totally is,’ Elias added.
In her Facebook message to fans this week, Gilbert quoted an American writer, David Foster Wallace: ‘The truth will set you free — but not until it’s had its way with you.’ She added: ‘Yes, it has been hard. Yes, the truth has had its way with us. And yes, the truth still stands.’
One can only wish them well together and hope that Rayya Elias prevails over a cancer that Gilbert stresses was incurable.
But if she was saying she was forced to live a lie as a heterosexual for years — and a very profitable lie it was — then she only really has herself to blame.
As for her more conventionally misty-eyed fans, it may be one final burst of truth they might rather have been spared.
‘It sounds like a love story — and it totally is’