‘All the Way to the River’: Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir is wealthy, whiny and wildly tone deaf

Two years ago, I lost my five-year-old niece Emily to neuroblastoma: a rare and aggressive childhood cancer with one of the longest, most aggressive, and most toxic treatment protocols of any paediatric cancer.

For six months, I sat with Emily through multiple rounds of chemotherapy, wondering how one could ever describe the experience of cancer. A number of words came to me. “Excitement”, “joy” and “a sense of euphoria” were not among them.

This is how New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth Gilbert describes the period following the diagnosis of her long-time friend – and, in her final days, partner – Rayya Elias, after Rayya was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic and liver cancer in April 2016, at the age of 56.

“What I remember most about that time,” Gilbert writes, “is how electric I felt. My entire body and imagination were thrumming with the prospect of living without any limits or rules whatsoever – of doing whatever the hell we wanted; of burning up the last few months of Rayya’s life.”

The admission, from Gilbert’s new memoir All the Way to the River, is as bizarre as it is bewildering.

Marketed – predictably – as “a story of love, loss and liberation”, and lauded by Oprah as “the bravest thing [she’s] ever read”, the...

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