How Eat Pray Love author plotted to kill her lover

Elizabeth Gilbert returns with a beguiling tale of drug abuse, addiction, and co-dependent love

- Annabel Nugent

At the heart of Elizabeth Gilbert’s new memoir is a murder plot.

It’s fleeting and sudden, and crucially, it never comes to fruition, but it’s an important checkpoint in her story. It’s vital the reader know that Elizabeth Gilbert, the blonde, bright author behind Eat Pray Love, the zen mastermind and spiritual seeker, had planned to kill her girlfriend by replacing her morphine tablet with sleeping pills, knocking her out for long enough to administer a lethal dose of fentanyl. “That would surely kill her,” Gilbert had hoped.

The confession arrives around the halfway mark of All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation, Gilbert’s new book and a return to the genre of memoir that made her famous with 2006 behemoth Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia. Chronicling her yearlong, post-divorce journey around the world, that book (later adapted into a successful film starring Julia Roberts) made a star of its author and set the template for a new type of memoir that would dominate the publishing world in the years to come: white woman finds herself in beautiful, far-flung locales.

And so, murder? That’s not very Eat Pray Love. The same could be said of All the Way as a whole, really. Here are the basics: in 2000, Gilbert met Rayya Elias, a queer hairdresser and recovered drug addict who is everything Gilbert isn’t. Rayya is outspoken, wild, fearless; “I never once told anyone to fuck off,” laments Gilbert. When Rayya hits a rough patch years later, Gilbert moves her into a beautiful New Jersey church that she had purchased. (Acts of immense generosity were not unusual for Gilbert who, then newly flush from Eat Pray Love, was bestowing gifts and financial aid on anyone she crossed paths with).