LOVE HEAL LEARN?

A conversation with Elizabeth Gilbert on All the Way to the River, her controversial book about her relationship with her best friend Rayya.

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Q: Through your bestselling books, you've inspired so many people to pursue creativity fearlessly, to search for their own path to happiness and fulfilment, and to be true to themselves. Who do you think this new book is for; what kinds of readers do you most want to reach?

A: I am writing for people who are seekers, people who are hungry, people who are restless, people who, perhaps since earliest childhood, have felt that there absolutely has to be a higher meaning to life than what we have been shown. That hunger leads many of us to become artists and travellers and spiritual explorers - which is wonderful. But it can also lead many of us into the blind alleys and dangerous dead-end highways of addiction, compulsion and obsession.

I myself have spent most of my life walking that line between a healthy hunger to know the world and my place within it (which I think can be both exciting and generative) and a desperate longing to find fulfilment at any cost — often within the arms of another person whom I have become certain can save me from my own sometimes-exhausting appetites. I do not believe I am alone in any of this. This book is about the darker side of that spiritual, emotional and physical hunger - in its more extreme forms known as addiction - and how lost we can become in the endless search for connection and satisfaction.

And it is about the pathway out of that desperation, through a return to a more nourishing way of life.

Q: People have been asking you to write a book about Rayya and your loss for a while, but