Elizabeth Gilbert Rebrands Again in New Memoir
Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of “Eat, Pray, Love,” rebrands again in a new memoir “All the Way to the River.” Now she’s a sober former sex addict who just loves too much.
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I cannot keep up with all of Elizabeth Gilbert’s reincarnations. There was the carb and yoga-loving Eat, Pray, Love version, the woman who left her drab husband to go on a spiritual journey of self-discovery. (Gilbert neglected to mention she was cheating on him. That came out later in the New York Times, “Confessions of a Seduction Addict”.) In EPL she finds and marries a new soul mate, an older gem merchant Jose Nunes. But then, after the book buzz died down, Gilbert dumped him for another soul mate.
Plot twist! That soul mate was a woman, Rayya Elias, who had a terminal cancer diagnosis, which is convenient if you have a short soul mate attention span. Then after Elias died, Gilbert got another soul mate, photographer Simon MacArthur. It fizzled. Now, guess what?
Elizabeth Gilbert has rebranded as a love addict.
Which is a nicer way of saying “I use people.” Who can hate on love? You banal people may take love in regular human doses, but not Gilbert. She’s a glutton. A love overachiever. She loves too much.
Now in her tell-all memoir she reveals that (shocker) — she’s not the together self-help guru you imagined. The Dear Ones persona that fueled a gazillion-dollar publishing career wasn’t the whole story. In a recent New York Times feature (gift link) Gilbert confesses, actually she’s kind of a hot mess. (She also confessed she was a hot mess 10 years ago in the seduction addict piece.) Hey! It’s all copy.
If you ever longed for Twu Wuv to go splat, if you ever had apoplexies of jealousy looking at Schmoopie social media, enjoy the deep schadenfreude of Elizabeth Gilbert’s soul mate shit show.
Elias, a former heroin addict who had been sober for years, slid back into addiction after her diagnosis. She stayed up all night in their East Village penthouse, ingesting whiskey, morphine, Vicodin, marijuana, fentanyl and thousands of dollars worth of cocaine, which Gilbert bought from teenagers in the neighborhood.
She had become abusive and paranoid, picking invisible bugs off her skin, ranting about police surveillance, lashing out at Gilbert over imaginary failings, and refusing to let Gilbert sleep or outsource care to a home aide. To cope with the stress, Gilbert was self-medicating with booze, Xanax, Ambien, psilocybin and MDMA.
What a fairytale ending.
I’ll see your heroin addiction and raise you booze, Xanax, Ambien and mushrooms. Interesting how the very dead Rayya is described as an addict, but Gilbert is merely “self-medicating.”
At the time, this is how she was portraying her the Heart Wants What the Heart Wants storyline. She was leaving Nunes for her “best friend” but it was to be a caregiver. She’s not sloppy, she’s munificent and bi.
In July 2017, the author Elizabeth Gilbert posted a message to her million-plus Facebook followers about her partner, Rayya Elias, who was dying of pancreatic and liver cancer. The message featured a video of Elias singing a song they’d written together called “Happy Home,” and Gilbert ended on a hopeful note, telling readers it was possible to find “pockets of paradise on earth, even through all the suffering and loss and pain.”
Are “pockets of paradise” what they’re calling fentanyl now? Apparently, the whole death and dying relapse was a bummer. So, perhaps Rayya, a woman with a terminal diagnosis could be dispatched with sooner?
Elizabeth must ‘save herself.’
Around the time she posted the video of Elias singing, things had gotten so bad that Gilbert decided the only way to save herself was murder. Exhausted and terrified, she planned to replace Elias’s morphine with sleeping pills, then cover her with enough fentanyl patches to kill her. She had swapped the pills and was prepared to act but abandoned the plan when Elias sensed something was up and confronted her.
Looking back on that moment, which she recounts with forensic detail in her new memoir, “All the Way to the River,” Gilbert still can’t believe how close she came to killing the love of her life, and how big the chasm became between her inspirational public persona and her hellish private life.
“I’m the nice lady who wrote ‘Eat, Pray, Love,’ and I’m out in the park with fentanyl and morphine and sleeping pills trying to craft a murder,” Gilbert said in an interview at her Gramercy Park apartment, where she now leads a quiet life with her scruffy white rescue dog, Pepita.
I can’t believe this New York Times reporter is going along with the “save yourself” narrative. If a man said he was sick of caregiving his terminal wife and was plotting murder to end his misery — not hers — wouldn’t we be calling him a criminal? Or crafting a true crime Netflix special from this drama?
Not only am I struck with Gilbert’s tunnel vision here (are you Rayya’s only caregiver? Can you get a divorce or some respite care? What do you mean Rayya “wouldn’t let her”? SHE WAS A DYING WOMAN who couldn’t even score her own drugs.) I’m incredulous that we’re supposed to sympathize with Gilbert for her murderous urges toward a dying woman.
She’s just being real and authentic, Tracy. Caregiving is hard.
Yeah. My Aunt Joy did 14 years of solo dementia caregiving for her husband and nary a fentanyl patch. Frustration? Sure. Exhaustion. Absolutely. Murder? No. Thank God Gilbert never bred. Can you imagine her homebound with toddlers?
I SAID NO MORE COOKIES! As Bryson crushed Teddy Grahams into my Prada boots. Yes, I had to save myself. I came this close to killing my child…
But it’s your lesbian addict lover, so carry on.
Now 56, sober and celibate and committed to a 12-step program for sex and love addiction, Gilbert radiates calm and composure. With her close shaved graying hair and soft smile lines and crow’s feet, recently liberated after she stopped using Botox and fillers, she has the serene bearing of a monk — a monk with a sly, self-deprecating sense of humor.
Could we discuss Elizabeth Gilbert’s hair for a moment?
No Tracy. It’s retrograde and sexist to judge a woman’s appearance.
I’m forging ahead anyway. Because I MUST BE HONEST, Dear Ones! Her buzzcut looks like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest meets White Lotus. It’s one part aspirational cult leader, two parts the We Do Not Care Club for menopause.
Oh, isn’t she brave forgoing botox and highlights? How low maintenance. What a rebuke to the patriarchal gatekeepers of our appearance. I would suggest that if you really want to challenge the gatekeepers, gain 20 pounds. Have you ever met a zaftig Buddhist monk? No, you have not.
When I asked about how close she came to committing murder, Gilbert replied, “It seemed like a great idea!” a response so absurd and unfiltered that we both burst out laughing.
Has anyone considered that Elizabeth Gilbert might be a sociopath?
WHO LAUGHS ABOUT NEARLY KILLING THEIR WIFE?
I mean, for real. Is anyone else checking off the boxes on the Hare Psychopath list? Charming, glib, superficial, exploitative, promiscuous, prone to boredom, manipulative….
In a way, though, another dramatic metamorphosis is entirely in line with Gilbert’s public image. Her recent evolution is the latest in a series of radical transformations that Gilbert has chronicled in her memoirs, essays, TED Talks, speaking tours and earnest dispatches on social media, where she has 2.7 million followers.
In a way, though, another dramatic metamorphosis is entirely in line with a full-blown personality disorder.
Psychopaths are having a moment. And judging by our political zeitgeist, unapologetic sociopathy is profitable. Maybe Gilbert isn’t just a saccharine phony with bad hair. Maybe she’s authentically fraudulent and you’re all her suckers. So absurd. So unfiltered.
Did Elizabeth Gilbert ever meet/have s*x with someone who didn’t turn out to be a “Soul Mate.” I’m not entirely averse to the idea of romance, but f*ck me, that’s a lot of Soul Mates for one person.
I also suspect that she might not be a very nice person.
LFTT
She writes about her “love addiction” in the Guardian. Describes herself as a codependent. Appropriating the chump mantel, when she’s got the power in the relationship. She’s physically well and rich. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/aug/30/eat-pray-love-author-elizabeth-gilbert-leaving-marriage-dying-friend
She must have been a member of the Soulmate of the Month Club
That’s hilarious!
That’s the thing. Everything is so over the top. She can’t just have an audience, she has “dear ones.” Gilbert doesn’t break up, she has swoons of true love that CANNOT BE DENIED. Until, oh hey, there comes another soul mate into view. And it’s nothing less than a soul mate.
You could argue she feels over the top about everything, or maybe she needs chaos to feel anything at all, because she’s a FW. And she’s mimicking what she thinks love looks like and what people want to admire.
CL,
Perhaps (at least in her case) Soul Mates are like busses. You wait for one for ages and nothing happens, and then all of a sudden three or four turn up one after the other.
I also suspect that she just might be a bit of a “Drama Queen” swimming in a bucket of her own hyperbole …. and that’s she also just not very nice.
LFTT
She’s a would be murderer. Not just a drama queen
Her account of the planned murder was absolutely chilling in my view. Apparently, she only refrained from following through because the designated victim became suspicious? Her future partners better watch out, I guess.
Lol. Buses. Indeed. So many soulmates!
I still have not forgiven Gilbert for her contribution to the destruction of my beloved Bali thanks to Eat Pray Love.
Gilbert seems like a narc-sociopath but despite her sober status from sex addiction probably really wants someone more famous as her next partner. She is a seductress par excellence so the current monk vibe probably won’t last long. She might join a nunnery and give Pema Chodron a run for her money by going into a cave for 20 years. One can only hope.
Thanks Tracy for staying on the trail!
I remember the fascinated elation I felt when I read “Eat, Pray, Love”. I was swept up. It was a kind of high. We have to protect our emotions and beliefs and stay critical and grounded when we encounter people like Elizabeth Gilbert who have these outsized powers to convince. I definitely recognize the type from my FW. They seduce and discard in service of worldly fame.
Top comments on the NYT article are all negative, which together with CL’s analyses of Gilbert are reassuring to me, because I was never taken (in) by Gilbert, who, along with Glennon Doyle, I always considered a self-promoter rather than a genuinely self-reflective memoirist.
It’s all there from the beginning. She is “unhappy” so she finds another person to manipulate and conquer. Once they commit to her she’s got her victory and moves on.
There should be a bingo card for her next moves. Squares would be – young new lover – claiming just remembered sa – super scary heath diagnosis – young naive reporter to cover her stories – starting a protest movement or charity – chronic invisible illness – adopting a child – and the free square would be • self reported story.
She insane but a great clinical study.
I’ve never understood how people like Gilbert just saunter along looking for new “soul mates” and like magic, there’s a queue of them, available and into her. After divorcing my FW, it took me years to find someone I really thought was worthwhile. I couldn’t move at the pace these people keep if I wanted to (and I don’t). But maybe that’s the key — if you have no standards except “I can fool this one too,” there really is a queue?
I guess it is partly wealth and fame, and partly seeking out “soul mates” who are similarly eager to get partnered for ego kibbles (and a few trusting chumps now and then, because they are good at camouflage).
She horrifies me. Serene monk, my ass. She’s not about love, she’s about merch.
Out of curiosity, I searched for the Rayyva “Happy Home” video, and contrary to the title, Rayyva looks absolutely tormented, like a TV documentary of someone who just had her house bombed. I stopped watching after I heard this part, “From a boy to a girl, and then back again, I have you, I lose you, I find you again…. You’re not one of us, You’re not meant to walk among us.”
Hard to believe Gilbert expects fans to eat up her criminal, unconscionable drivel. Harder to believe she can keep a fan base and the adulation of reporters and reviewers after exposing her plot to kill her twu wuv because it was just too hard for her to provide care. As Tracy wrote, “I can’t believe this New York Times reporter is going along with the “save yourself” narrative. If a man said he was sick of caregiving his terminal wife and was plotting murder to end his misery — not hers — wouldn’t we be calling him a criminal?”
liz gilbert is exhausting. i find it best to stay away from people who are exhausting, as they seem to fall somewhere along the personality disorders. this is my opinion.
and i’m tired of this concept of BIG LOVE, BIG MAGIC. it makes no sense to me. there’s no humility involved–
as for the commercialization, liz has it figured out. more specifically, she’s figured out cult behavior and monetized it.
#bigbullshit
*along the personality disorders spectrum
I’ll just repeat what I said on yesterday’s post. Her whole brand is “raw honesty” and “vulnerability” and “making it okay to not be okay.” Yet, she lies. She LIES. She told her umpteen million followers that this Rayaa thing was a love story for the ages. Is it a love story if your schmoopie is shooting cocaine into her neck? Coke that was purchased by manipulating your followers’ credulity? Why aren’t you telling anyone about that part while it’s happening? I’ll tell you why — impression management.
On a book review page, someone said, “I just adore her! So honest!” I would posit that this reaction is why we have unapologetic sociopathy on rampage right now. Because people inexplicably eat this crap up. I do not understand it.
Maybe you should post this comment on the book review page? Start changing the narrative one small action at a time
Oh, trust me. I did!
OK, I let out a primal laugh that was so intense, itmade me worry that my husband might hear me and think I had lost my mind.
The WDNC club is kind and supportive so let’s not taint them by association, but I appreciate your humor so much.
Observing Gilberts bizarre low-level-consistent-fame leaves me very contented to be a dependable obscure nobody.
I laughed so loud to this sentence while I was on the bus to work that the lady sitting next to me looked at me like I was a sociopath and then got up and chose a seat on the opposite end of the bus.
Soul Sister
Yes! Thank you CL! Gilbert most definitely has a personality disorder — and it’s been fed for YEARS by the mysterious promotion of her books. I say “mysterious” because I wondered why her publisher was so willing to pay her so much to go on her Eat Pray Love self-discovery trip. Like, how did she get THAT deal??
I hated that book the first time I read it and was able to read between the lines that she’s a self-serving narcissist who uses people and moves on.
But I think you hit the nail on the head — she is very likely a sociopath or psychopath. It’s one thing if your terminally ill loved one wants you to put them out of their misery. It’s another thing to laugh that you PLANNED to mu*rder them…until they figured it out. Like WTF?? She’s horrific.
As for her hair, I think she’s realized she has so much money and power now she doesn’t have to do anything anymore and she still has a bizarre following.
I think she’s going for the chemo look as a marketing tool to evoke her dead partner.
Or maybe for the sober Buddhist-monk adjacent look. Still marketing.
I remember when Eat, Pray, Love was all the rage. All the Moms were reading it. I thought she was an awful person when she was laying on the bathroom floor boo-hooing because she was bored with her first husband. And, yes, I noticed that her relationships all seemed to have some overlap. I figured if she was willing to tell the world about her horrible actions, then reality was sooooo much worse.
in Eat Pray Love she actually kept most of the overlap quite quiet. So “truthful” in the way that the Little House books were “truthful” about the pioneer experience of the Ingalls family. Just enough “truth” to make for a captivating story that legions will eat up, but a self serving and partial “truth” at best. Ugh.
“Insane” is the most accurate descriptor, in my mind, for this woman. She fell off some mental cliff after years of instability masking as self discovery.
An exuberant insane sociopath who has traipsed through her priceless life’s journey. (dropping hand grenades all over the trail for others to get blown up by)
It’s fascinating how they draw ppl in to their world of drama and chaos over and over again and are so damn convincing too!
I remember the excitement buzz over ‘Eat, Pray, Love’. It felt thrilling to witness someone that unmoored and on a personal meaning quest of some sort. She expressed seemingly legit passion and excitement for her solo year discovering her buried soul. Opening any and all doors to self discovery, impressive how you can fake transformational experiences so well. It was strangely uplifting to read at the time. You were rooting for her to succeed.
It came out 20 years ago. I wasn’t wise to the harm of that level of self focus yet. But I’ve survived a FW since, so I get entitlement and selfishness on a whole new level now.
I didn’t realize she was a cheater, but totally can see that now, it makes perfect sense. The devastation described early in her book, crumbling into fetal oblivion on her bathroom floor with the impending divorce going down felt so real, raw and an acutely vulnerable risk of exposure to take. I really felt something for her agony when I wasn’t aware she caused it!
Never did see the movie, she was already too much for me towards the end of her book.
I wonder if she reads any of her reviews on this partner’s death post or if she forces herself to stay in her bubble narrative of what a light she is to other’s lives.
I think these entitled selfish folk will always just surround themselves with confused people who will support and cheer their warped narratives.
You pretty much have to do that, snow yourself into believing your own highly self indulgent crap as divine gospel truths.
I haven’t read EPL, but when it came out and I heard about it, I wondered how many idiots were going to wreck their lives by quitting their jobs and/or leaving their spouses and running off to Italy or India or Nepal or wherever. I decided it wasn’t my problem and was something I can’t control anyway.
“It felt thrilling to witness someone that unmoored and on a personal meaning quest of some sort.”
Same with James Frey and “A Million Little Pieces.”
“It came out 20 years ago. I wasn’t wise to the harm of that level of self focus yet. But I’ve survived a FW since, so I get entitlement and selfishness on a whole new level now.”
Exactly this, for me! I didn’t see it at the time but I sure cannot stomach any of her psychoses now.
“Tell me you have a personality disorder without saying that you have a personality disorder.”
Funny that she mentions the “it always feels like you’re 16 when you’re falling in love”-she has the “dating” energy of high school sophomore. Just undifferentiated ego mass, hypomania, and hormones. I wish I had the DNA that let me fall in love like that without taking massive sanity hit (granted that could explain some other stuff-see below). I find the process to be downright traumatic.
I was also struck by “my partner is addicted-*I* am self-medicating.” So were they! At least they had the decency to be dying of cancer and in pain all of the time. It doesn’t justify the abuse but good lord. Gotta love that Fuckwit trait-“when you do it, it’s awful, when I do it, it’s justified! And you’re even more awful for bringing it up!”
And if my understanding of her addictions is at all correct she does not have a single normally functioning dopamine pathway left. Look out for her next book in 14 years where she discusses the rigors of relationship addiction with late-stage Parkinson’s. Just watch.
Therapeutically? I’m kinda curious what she’s running from dashing around like that. If you suddenly shave your head where I come from and you have something else going on, too. Perhaps I just woke up mean today and she just regular old “likes the attention.” Can never rule that out.
I got the “I love differently” in the late stages of my “marriage”-it came up a lot after D-Day during the brief run at cohabitation (haven’t seen the monster in 2 years-I checked my notes-2 years since the “stormed out of couples counseling incident!”) I had to grin either at this article or yesterday’s-that jumping from lover to lover is a nice way of saying “I use people.”
Have a Mighty Monday!
Ugh, you couldn’t pay me to relive that time of my life. High school love is limerence, drama, and hormones. It was exhausting!
It’s absolutely bizarre for an adult approaching sixty to speak this way and think it’s somehow a good thing.
As a Chump who is alive in spite of FW plans for my fatal accident while married, I loathe this woman and wish people would pay attention to her murderous intent!
Gilbert could hardly be seen publicly dumping a dying woman so making it look like suicide preserved Gilbert’s all important self image. Now she’s spinning the story as caregiver overwhelm or caregiver psychosis. We’ll never really know if Elias’s behavior towards the end was as as bad as Gilbert describes it or if that was the narrative required to rationalize the murder scheme.
Has anyone considered that the main reason Gilbert dumped her husband and started up with Elias in the first place was to dip into all those good drugs people get in hospice? I’ve heard of pill whores pushing to get their own parents into end of life care because that’s when the normal restrictions come off the serious controlled substances.
Yikes! Good thing you escaped. I sometimes think my FW would have liked to kill me but he lacked the guts. Instead he just was awful to me when I was deeply depressed, probably in the hope that I’d kill myself.
I tend to think that the FWs who want to leave the chump (but lack the nerve to do it or don’t have a soft place to land) have murderous thoughts about their chumps.
Yes OHFFS. Yes. It is another excellent reason to be grateful for the cheating accomplice to put these idiots in limerance and get them to monkey branch away from us. The chumps being more at risk for being abused further and much much worse without their new target or soft landing.
Mz. Gilbert and Cheaty McLiarface share a common trait. They are both acting in a perpetual pubescent state of what they think love is. Chasing the next dopamine hit from their next “soul mate”. Limmerance mistaken for genuine connection. It would be amusing if not for the massive damage done to the reality based people left in the wake of their never ending pursuits.
I was coming here to make the same comment about my ex, that she had a very similar idea of “love” as Gilbert and what you ascribe to your Cheaty McLiarface. For my ex, she thought that good s*x was the same as true love. That she had cycled through many men before me, and then she’s gone through at least one more since we split (not the AP though), is very much how Gilbert seems to live her life.
And for sure, there is real damage to people like us, mostly psychological, since I did avoid my ex attempting murder of me (I think!). I have trouble trusting people, which is problematic when trying to date again. On the other hand, it is easier to detect people who, like Gilbert, are complete phonies, even if other people don’t.
I knew by age twelve that limerence isn’t real love (otherwise why did I fall in and out of crushes every week and a half?). At least I had the sense to be embarrassed by the shallowness of it so I have to conclude that grown-ass adults who get “swept away” are clinically age-regressing into some prepubescent stage.
In other words, this gets into some pretty weird clinical territory if the tendency relates to some of the more extreme dissociative behavior seen in borderline personality disorder where disordered individuals under stress might dramatically shift into far younger versions of themselves or even radically different personalities.
I had these discussions with both my therapist and my older attorney. Disordered people often try to reinvent themselves over and over because they don’t have much of a foundation and don’t quite know who they are. My attorney kept it brief because he was billing in increments, but yes, he had observed these patterns repeatedly over his four-plus decades of practice in family law. He has a therapist friend who owed him a favor or two that he consulted twice during my divorce proceedings regarding my STBX.
A twelve-step group was a significant factor in my turnaround, but you must work the program long-term, in most cases. What she’s written of late doesn’t sound like she’s actively working the program. She’s claiming “all better,” which is a bit presumptive, given her history. My ex had a similar “all better” claim that I knew was bogus. Boy, was that confirmed during the divorce that had to be.
The admission of murderous thoughts is just horrid. She had a plan. Ick! I can hardly imagine dwelling on such thoughts when you’re a pair. After my ex left the second time, sure, I thought it would be easier if he disappeared and/or passed away, but I wasn’t about to take such things into my own hands. Never!
Just a mess.
Three words; borderline personality disorder.
Why is it always the homely types like Gaiman and Gilbert who imagine themselves world class seducers? Gilbert’s embarrassing humble bragging about her compulsive “seduction” (which someone less self-promoting and genuinely on the road to redemption might call “coercion/control/conning,” etc.) makes me think she’s the grown-up, real-life version of Mary Katherine Gallagher from Superstar, the Molly Shannon vehicle.
I thought the Superstar franchise– about the dorky Catholic schoolgirl with an improbable fantasy life– was moderately funny in a crude and absurd way but I sensed something dark underlying the characterization as if the films were a euphemized origin story for personality disorder.
True to form, when I looked up Shannon’s personal backstory, it seemed horrific enough to make someone at least wobble on the brink of Cluster B if not fall all the way in. Apparently when Shannon was four, her father (who was reportedly a closeted homosexual and may or may not have led a double life) wiped out most of the family in a drunk driving incident, killing Shannon’s mother, sister, cousin and babysitter and leaving Shannon and another sister injured and severely traumatized.
It seems from interviews and an autobiography that Shannon has “forgiven” her father. I can understand the need to find peace but this doesn’t take away from the fact that this guy murdered his family or put to rest speculations that people who do such things might subconsciously have intended them. In any case, what he did was tremendously abusive to say the least.
Most people who experience abuse and trauma in childhood don’t end up becoming perpetrators themselves but I imagine there’s this period in early life where the roulette wheel is spinning and could potentially land on any number of adult outcomes, one of which might be “world famous comedian” and another might be “potentially murderous sociopath.”
I have no idea what kind of betrayals Gilbert experienced in childhood that drive her to compulsively reenact them at other people’s expense but it’s clear that the “addiction” (if you can call it that) is for betrayal, not sex, wuv or “seduction.” In any event, it’s obvious which way that dial wobbled.
Lol at the Mary Katherine comparison.
The original skits are even weirder haha. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Jk21qZsAXYY
I think Gaiman seemed to seek out the most vulnerable targets he could find. If I’m not mistaken, at least one of his reported victims was very young and on the brink of homelessness (and a lesbian). Another one was much older, but also severely at risk of losing her home. This couldn’t be any further from “seduction”, in my view. About Gilbert, I’m not so sure, but Rayya Elias appears to have been very vulnerable as well when their relationship began.
I’m all for any woman embracing her gray (that’s not the sun glinting off blonde in my picture) but how you live your life matters far more than how you look, and this woman has lived a self-indulgent life.
Anyhow, this is a screenshot of my Facebook group for my monthly book club, which offered 6 regular picks (including Gilbert’s new book) this month plus several add-on choices. I’m quite gratified that Gilbert’s new book was one of the LEAST popular choices.
https://imgur.com/a/062Pibl
Sitting here eating mac n cheese on my lunch break, and I’m… confused. Maybe fellow chumps can help me.
So Lesbian Soul Mate got a terminal cancer diagnosis, and relapsed into heroin addiction, as well as other substances (not uncommon for most substance abusers to use more than one). She couldn’t get the substance on her own (because she was too physically weak?) and so therefore, Liz had to go and get it for her… somehow forced? While also caring for her medically (Lesbian Soul Mate also forced Liz to do this). And the only solution Liz could think of… was murder?
I have some very, very personal experience with caring for a family member, dying from cancer. It’s a miserable way to go. I’m not going to deny that. I’m also not going to deny that for the first while, they are physically capable of things, and then, after some time… they aren’t. So maybe Lesbian Soul Mate was physically threatening before Liz had to go make the drug runs. Also, we chumps know about coercive control. Maybe Lesbian Soul Mate was emotionally abusive.
But really? The only escape was fucking MURDER? Doesn’t Liz have millions from her books and interviews and talks and whatever? She wrote THE BOOK that every middle aged woman recommended you read when they found out you were mentally ill, back around 2010. Anxiety? Depression? Autism? ADHD? Bipolar? OCD? PSTD? Any given Personality Disorder? Yoga, meditation, and have you read Eat, Love, Pray? She should have had the funds to escape. And plenty of industry and non industry contacts who could help somehow. I never thought of murdering my FW – and he enjoyed physically terrifying me, plus I had very little money.
I’m not saying it couldn’t happen. I just feel like we shouldn’t take an admitted manipulator – I’m sorry, I mean “seduction addict” – on her word. Then again, maybe her own drug abuse clouded her reasoning.
Also, like everyone else, I too noticed that she described Lesbian Soul Mate as an addict, while saying what she was doing was self-medicating. Uh, that’s… that’s how most addicts are. You’re also an addict, and not just a sex and love addict. And I’m sure your Lesbian Soul Mate was also self medicating, trying to escape from the physical pain and emotional toll.
Also, fun fact. You’re never an ex-addict. Once you’re an addict, you’re never not one, you always have that addiction. You’re just either clean or not. Similar to how you’re never an ex-anorexic (or insert other ED) here. You’re just either in recovery or not. It never really goes away. That’s not to say addicts should live in shame forever – quite the opposite! – but the struggle doesn’t really stop.
My heart goes out to the actual loved ones of Lesbian Soul Mate.
I just wanted to say how much I love your writing and insights—you have such a gift for making us laugh at the craziness all around us! You always hit the mark!