All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation

by Elizabeth Gilbert

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Covering the full spectrum from love and loss to hope and healing, Elizabeth Gilbert can always be trusted to deliver soul-searching personal narratives with invaluable and universal takeaways.

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798217288489
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	09/23/2025
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 5.70(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Elizabeth Gilbert is an award-winning American writer of both fiction and nonfiction, named one of the most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2008. Her books have been New York Times bestsellers, including the #1 New York Times bestseller list for Committed. Her short story collection, Pilgrims, received the Pushcart Prize and was a finalist for the
PEN/Hemingway Award, and her novel, Stern Men, was a New York Times Notable Book. Her 2002
book, The Last American Man, was a finalist for both the National Book
Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is best known for her memoir
Eat, Pray, Love, which has been published in more than thirty languages and was made into a film.

Hometown:

Hudson Valley, New York

Date of Birth:

July 18, 1969

Place of Birth:

Waterbury, Connecticut

Education:

BA, New York University, 1991 (Political Science)

Website:

http://www.elizabethgilbert.com

Editorial Reviews

It’s a brave story with an ultimately hopeful outcome. Anyone who has faced addiction—or loved someone who has—will recognize and be moved by Gilbert’s journey.”

Booklist (starred review)

Inspiring…Gilbert achieves her signature intimacy through a bluntly confessional tone… and an admirable ability to stare darkness in the face without losing hope.”

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Praise for All the Way to The River:

“Deeply personal…a beautiful portrait of a woman learning to care for herself.” –Real Simple

“Inspiring account…Gilbert achieves her signature intimacy through a bluntly confessional tone… and an admirable ability to stare darkness in the face without losing hope. Readers struggling with addiction or seeking a path through heartbreak will find invaluable wisdom in these pages.” – Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“Gilbert rips open her life to share all the painful moments and grief … in a story of despair and courage that … must have been unimaginable to write… Fans of her more lighthearted memoir and novels may be shocked by this book’s intensity, but it’s a brave story with an ultimately hopeful outcome. Anyone who has faced addiction—or loved someone who has—will recognize and be moved by Gilbert’s journey.” – Booklist, Starred Review

“The author of the world’s most famous memoir returns to the form to tell the story of a great love….A worthy addition to the literature of addiction and recovery, charming and harrowing by turns.” – Kirkus

From the Publisher

2025-05-29
The author of the world’s most famous memoir returns to the form to tell the story of a great love.

“This book—its stories, prayers, poems, journal entries, photos, and drawings—is my very best effort to tell the truth about what happened between me and Rayya Elias—our friendship, our romance, our beauty, rage, and pain. It tells the story of Rayya’s addiction, her relapse, and her death. It also tells the story of my own addiction and my eventual surrender into recovery.” Gilbert (Eat Pray Love,City of Girls, etc.) brings her beloved Rayya vibrantly to life on the page, showing how and why the woman she met in 2002 as a hairdresser in the East Village was “a legend to all who knew her.” When Rayya was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2016, Gilbert ended her marriage (which by then had become a distant second fiddle to the relationship with Rayya), and the two became lovers. There was a good part, and then a very bad part in the months leading up to Rayya’s death in 2018. The book also follows the story of Gilbert’s subsequent recovery from sex and love addiction through devoted adherence to a 12-step program. Since she does not “have the heart to write out the excruciating details of the binge that I went on” after Rayya died, citing concern for the privacy of others, she focuses instead on the spiritual and emotional progress she has finally been able to achieve, documented in earnest poems and winsome doodles as well as well-written anecdotes. “Readers of my earlier work may remember that I reached nearly this same level of peace and tranquility back when I was in India, in the middle of myEat Pray Love travels, after months of disciplined prayer, meditation, and retreat.” The difference this time, she says, is that she has the support she needs not to “drive my life off a cliff all over again.”

A worthy addition to the literature of addiction and recovery, charming and harrowing by turns.

Kirkus Reviews