Elizabeth Gilbert’s new memoir exemplifies ‘priv-lit’

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 memoir tells the story of Gilbert’s decision to leave her second husband for her dying best friend – her “literal ride or die lover”.

The book – which reads like an extension of Gilbert’s Substack Letters from Love – is her first major confessional memoir since the 2006 publishing sensation and cultural phenomenon Eat, Pray, Love. (Committed, her 2010 meditation on the institution of marriage, was framed as a sequel, but blended memoir with cultural history.)

In Eat Pray Love, which has sold over 30 million copies and been translated into more than 30 languages, Gilbert presented herself as an “everyday” woman who, reeling from a contentious divorce, took off around the world in search of “everything”. (Andrew Gottlieb’s 2009 parody Drink, Play, F@#k sold itself as “one man’s search for anything.”)

In All the Way to the River – a book that could just as easily be titled All the Way to the Bank – Gilbert repositions herself as a spiritual teacher of sorts, interweaving reflections on love and addiction with amateur poetry, doodles and handwritten affirmations: “Surrender your why,” she writes. “What hurts you blesses you. Darkness is your candle.”

The result is a collection of self-help cliches dressed up as wisdom, structured through a series of Instagram-style vignettes with titles so earnest they verge on parody: “I belong here”, “Who will be my home?”, “What’s water?”.

Like Eat, Pray, Love before it, All the Way to the River is a textbook example of priv-lit.

Wealthy, whiny and white

Privileged literature, or priv-lit, was first defined in 2010 by writers Joshunda Sanders and Diana Barnes-Brown, in an article titled Eat, Pray, Spend, in the now defunct Bitch magazine.

Priv-lit, as the pair explained, refers to “literature or media whose expressed goal is one of spiritual, existential, or philosophical enlightenment contingent upon women’s hard work, commitment, and patience, but whose actual barriers to entry are primarily financial”.

Pre-diagnosis, Rayya was a New York hairdresser who handled Liz’s “duck fluff” hair (and who supposedly saw “a big circle of golden light” around Liz’s head the first time they met). After “twenty years of terrific haircuts”, Rayya became Liz’s confidant, neighbour and eventual best friend – slowly morphing into something Gilbert “did not have words for” as a happily married woman who was “trying to be good”.