Strap in! Liz Gilbert’s latest memoir is going to take you far beyond the river. You will journey down the river to the sea, and go on a deep dive to the bottom of the ocean before she brings you back up for air.
They say that a good memoir shares the good, the bad, and the ugly. Gilbert includes all of these touchpoints with raw honesty and courageous vulnerability.
The news that a beloved friend, Rayya, has been diagnosed with aggressive liver and pancreatic cancer, and has been told she has six months to live, forces Gilbert to expose her true feelings to herself, her friend, and her husband. She declares her love for Rayya, and divorces her husband, who she deeply loves and cares about. Rayya, feeling the same way, shares her true feelings, and the two friends become lovers. As Gilbert herself has shared on a podcast, “this book would have been a true love story if she had lived the six months that the medical professionals predicted.” Instead, feisty, defiant Rayya continued to live many months beyond her prognosis. And those long months are where the meat of the story takes us. Addiction, co-dependency, caregiving, caregiver collapse (I now have a term for what I went through after a similar journey with a family member), and a host of other deep emotions and behaviors that many of us tuck away up on a top shelf are all laid out on the table.
The master wordsmith that we have come to love in Gilbert doesn’t disappoint. The way she tells the tale and weaves in her own poetry and some sketches offers some periods of respite as Gilbert and Rayya claw their way out of the deep, isolated, dark world they found themselves in once the honeymoon effect wore off. But where does that leave their relationship? You will have to embark on the journey to find out.
The one piece, for which Gilbert provides a disclaimer, that felt missing was the origin stories of both women, which might have provided more insight into how they became the women they were. As the saying goes, it is not, “What is wrong with you?”, but rather, “What happened to you?”
Thank you, Liz, for sharing your journey and allowing us to take a deeper look into our own lives and what it means to have a real, human experience. 5 Stars!
Chances are, the library already has a waiting list for this best-seller, so check your local book stores or buy it now: https://amzn.to/4ntvTiZ
They say that a good memoir shares the good, the bad, and the ugly. Gilbert includes all of these touchpoints with raw honesty and courageous vulnerability.
The news that a beloved friend, Rayya, has been diagnosed with aggressive liver and pancreatic cancer, and has been told she has six months to live, forces Gilbert to expose her true feelings to herself, her friend, and her husband. She declares her love for Rayya, and divorces her husband, who she deeply loves and cares about. Rayya, feeling the same way, shares her true feelings, and the two friends become lovers. As Gilbert herself has shared on a podcast, “this book would have been a true love story if she had lived the six months that the medical professionals predicted.” Instead, feisty, defiant Rayya continued to live many months beyond her prognosis. And those long months are where the meat of the story takes us. Addiction, co-dependency, caregiving, caregiver collapse (I now have a term for what I went through after a similar journey with a family member), and a host of other deep emotions and behaviors that many of us tuck away up on a top shelf are all laid out on the table.
The master wordsmith that we have come to love in Gilbert doesn’t disappoint. The way she tells the tale and weaves in her own poetry and some sketches offers some periods of respite as Gilbert and Rayya claw their way out of the deep, isolated, dark world they found themselves in once the honeymoon effect wore off. But where does that leave their relationship? You will have to embark on the journey to find out.
The one piece, for which Gilbert provides a disclaimer, that felt missing was the origin stories of both women, which might have provided more insight into how they became the women they were. As the saying goes, it is not, “What is wrong with you?”, but rather, “What happened to you?”
Thank you, Liz, for sharing your journey and allowing us to take a deeper look into our own lives and what it means to have a real, human experience. 5 Stars!
Chances are, the library already has a waiting list for this best-seller, so check your local book stores or buy it now: https://amzn.to/4ntvTiZ
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