Elizabeth Gilbert’s New Book Is Predictable Anti-Marriage Propaganda

No popular writer of this century has probably influenced the marriage and relationship culture more than Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the 2006 runaway bestseller, Eat, Pray, Love. No one has probably done more damage, either. Her latest memoir, All the Way to the River (“River”), a long-winded, empty hodgepodge of debauchery, adds to her shameless stream of anti-family and anti-marriage propaganda. It, too, is an instant bestseller, also endorsed by Oprah.

The Legacy of Eat, Pray, Love

Nearby 20 years ago, Eat, Pray, Love empowered women to leave their husbands and travel the world to find themselves. The book sold more than 18 million copies, made Gilbert a household name, and spawned a Hollywood hit movie starring Julia Roberts.  The book was marketed as a template for the masses. Of course, real women don’t have the time or money to mimic Gilbert’s protocol. But haven’t many ditched their husbands in the aftermath? 

After all, in the divorce wave that followed the enactment of no-fault divorce, a Stanford University study found that a representative sample of women initiated 69% of divorces between 2009-2015. Gilbert also spawned copycats, with publishers eager to fund divorce memoirs by feminist women telling tales of achieving freedom and self-actualization post-divorce. 

After Eat, Pray, Love, Gilbert penned another bestseller about marrying the man she’d met in Bali during her enlightenment jaunt—Committed: A Sceptic Makes Peace with Marriage. When immigration problems thwarted Gilbert’s crusade to bring her lover to the U.S., she married him.

Now, in River, she shares the story of divorcing that husband, “Felipe,” after falling for her hairdresser, Rayya, an ex-felon and junkie, with whom Gilbert embarked on a psychedelic mushrooms, MDMA, weed, Xanax, alcohol, and sex-induced spree in their New York City penthouse. Less than two years later, Rayya died from terminal liver and pancreatic cancer. 

When Gilbert ran out of money for cocaine, meth, heroin, and the like, she simply booked more speaking engagements to peddle her fake spiritual master persona. In a particularly disconcerting scene, she describes standing on stage, feeling the thrill of holding the audience in the palm of her hand, aware that a male conference speaker is watching her. When he texts and asks to meet up (he’s married, by the way), Gilbert doesn’t respond. Clearly, she gets off on power, angling for brownie points in her memoir, while acknowledging her ability to lure him in the first place.

Twenty years ago, Elizabeth Gilbert's 'Eat, Pray, Love' empowered women to leave their husbands and travel the world to find themselves. Her latest, 'All the Way to the River,' adds to her shameless stream of anti-marriage propaganda.

Gilbert doesn’t reveal the number of sex partners, but we’re made to understand the tally is substantial. When one relationship fizzles, she plows on to the next one. Her lifestyle exemplifies what’s taken place in our country since adoption of no-fault divorce more than 50 years ago. As with Gilbert, these laws empower spouses to call it quits, unilaterally, without accountability. 

In the aftermath, divorce rates soared, including those for second and third marriages. The devastation to children has been substantial. Gray divorce by Baby Boomers has exploded. Like Gilbert, when men and women tire of the opposite gender, they move on to a same-sex partner. Today, couples bored with monogamy are fueling the rise in polygamy.

Gilbert Avoids Responsibility

Sure, Gilbert acknowledges her destructive behavior in River, but she sidesteps responsibility, repeatedly casting herself as a victim. After Rayya died, Gilbert entered a 12-step program for sex and love addicts, merely transferring attention to her next high-octane obsession. She admits to daily check-ins, binges on 12-step meetings, and adorns her house with “literally hundreds of new plants.” She says her new handlers may one day permit her to have a dog—essentially, she makes them responsible for her behavior.

Gilbert warns us not to question her culpability, either. Addicts “don’t deserve your contempt,” she writes, adding we all come from the same “bloodline.” 

“I suspect at some level that I must be you, and that you might be us and that all of us might be Rayya,” she concludes.

Count me out.

Sadly, Gilbert has an uncanny resemblance to Hazel Motes, the protagonist of Wise Blood, by National Book Award Winner Flannery O’Connor, posthumously celebrating her 100^th birthday this year. Motes, a huckster and nihilist, forms his own Church Without Christ and is tormented by a deep-seated need for salvation which he continually rejects. Gilbert is no different, endlessly reinventing herself as she heads toward destruction. 

Speaking of God, Gilbert is adamant that God has been guiding her. Why should we believe her? “Because I know the voice of God,” Gilbert tells us. But her god is like Motes’, a “god of my understanding,” she calls him, fashioned in her own image. She’s frustrated when her god “will not allow” her to be God, too. Which seems to be exactly what Gilbert wants to be to all of us.

She and Rayya were “absolutely innocent,” Gilbert declares, adding that “All of us are innocent, or none of us are.” If Gilbert understood anything about God, however, she’d know it’s the exact opposite—all of us are guilty, including her. 

Finally, she hedges criticism about spilling all, in copious detail, about her dead lover. On page one, she announces that Rayya’s ghost gave her blessing for the tell-all. To that, Rayya’s sister says, “We all knew from Day 1 that a book was going to be written and money was going to be made out of my sister’s death.”

A False Prophet

I’d always sensed that Eat, Pray, Love was a sham. Years after reading it, I learned that Gilbert had contracted to write about her alleged transformation before even setting foot on a plane. I had the same sense reading Committed. Gilbert’s incessant drive to secure a visa for her lover seemed more driven by Gilbert’s desire to get her way rather than true love. And doesn’t River confirm her tall tales? After all, Gilbert concealed her sex, drugs, and rock and roll persona from the public while socking away millions.

We hold politicians, religious leaders, and other influencers accountable for their actions. Gilbert, her ilk, and the publishing industry should be held accountable, too.

How does Gilbert explain the contradictions between her books and her real life? She doesn’t. She gives no excuse for dumping her second husband other than falling for someone else. She ignores Eat, Pray, Love, until nearly the end of River when she brazenly states that her enlightenment tale was nevertheless true. She merely relapsed, she says, having been “left unsupervised” without a “program,” “community or sangha to support” her. Again, not her fault. Somebody else apparently owed her and was responsible for keeping her in check. 

Taking Swipes at the Patriarchy

After Eat, Pray, Love, Hyperion engaged Gilbert’s first husband to tell his side of the story. But his book was mysteriously never published. Out of so-called “respect,” she writes little about her second husband. But periodically Gilbert seems to erupt in anger. She notes, without further explanation, that “divorce and death” gutted her bank account. Were her husbands paid for their silence? 

Gilbert now tells women to run for their “literal life to get away from the institution of marriage.” And yet look what happened to her after she ran twice? She claims, without substantiation, that wives and mothers “give themselves to death,” and are depressed, less sexually active, earn less, etc. 

The truth is that married mothers are twice as likely to be “very happy” as single, childless women like Gilbert. It’s well-established, too, that divorce is a sucker punch for women economically. Turns out that the path to sexual satisfaction is also the opposite of Gilbert’s experimentation lifestyle. 

We hold politicians, religious leaders, and other influencers accountable for their actions. Gilbert, her ilk, and the publishing industry should be held accountable, too. Because for every book they sell and spouse they empower to destroy their family, they thwart the work of so many laboring to restore marriage to its rightful place of honor. Marriage matters. And when marriages and families flourish, so does our entire society.

“I offer this book with love and respect…to anyone who might need it,” Gilbert writes at the beginning of River. Trust me, no one does.

Beverly Willett is a lawyer, Co-founder of the Coalition for Divorce Reform, and author of Disassembly Required: A Memoir of Midlife Resurrection. Her novel-in-progress is entitled Nobody’s Fault.

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