The organizing principle and revelation of the book: Gilbert’s journey with Rayya is merely an extreme version of a dynamic that 'all of us' can relate to ... I’m not sure that’s true. I’m also not sure that it needs to be ... Gilbert’s prose in All the Way to the River is often strangely flat and clipped ... The new book reads, at times, like the transcript of a Ted talk ... Much of the book is like this, with one-sentence paragraphs surrounded by white space, somewhat in the manner of an Instagram post ... This time, Gilbert doesn’t gesture toward the idea of moving on, or of being changed.
A blockbuster: absolutely bonkers and right on the money; brutally honest, including about what it conceals; lurid, transcendent, and compelling. That said, whether readers enjoy it or even pick it up may depend upon their tolerance for its copious visitations from dead lovers and their mothers, dialogues with God, mediocre poems, lectures on codependence, and doodles with inspirational slogans, not to mention the author herself ... Across all her seeking and creating, uplifting and supporting, navel gazing and attention seeking, she is first and foremost a writer who excels at observing and chronicling individual experience, even if she sometimes walks a fine line between triumph and treacle ... Beautifully constructed, eloquent, funny, horrifying, self-aware, scrupulous, and gripping ... Its glory is in the details ... Does she go over the top? Sure. Does she do it well? Undoubtedly.
Earnest, vulnerable but ultimately quite corny ... The book includes heartfelt meditations on grief, addiction, friendship and loyalty. These are watered down by poetry that manages to be both facile and inscrutable ... Had this book not been muddled by New Age extras and a whiff of solipsism, it might have packed a wallop ... Gilbert is to be commended for not tying a bow on any of it ... The drawings become particularly irksome ... Metaphors abound, many of them cloaked in the goopy recovery language favored by Gilbert in her current incarnation.
Gilbert’s ruminations are brutally self-critical, but leave little breathing space for the reader to reflect and learn. Reflexivity is an important skill for the memoir writer, and while Gilbert excels in the self-analysis portion, she is less adept in the ways in which her story may spark broader lessons ... Gilbert also has an idiosyncratic spiritualist ethos which will not resonate with all readers. She frequently converses with a responsive God and communes with the dead ... Despite a few misgivings, Gilbert tells an honest, engrossing story of an unexpected love. She tells the story of an unstoic death while deftly interweaving the ecstasies and dangers of intimacy.
All the Way to the River is classic Gilbert: entertaining, insightful, wrenching, self-effacing, self-indulgent and profoundly real. Its strongest scenes, of Gilbert and partner Rayya Elias’s beyond-beautiful and then beyond-ugly interactions, are punch-to-the-gut powerful. They would be more so absent the book’s fatty connective tissue: didactic passages on addiction, 12-step wisdom, women’s history, trauma theory, and captioned scribbles and poems, all of which probably would have been excised if their author lacked millions of presold fans ... Gilbert also follows the advice of her feminist foremothers. She tells the truth about her wildly privileged, scrupulously examined life. In so doing, from her vaunted position, she furthers the enduring women’s crusade to split the world open.
This book might not be the coda that a reader of Eat Pray Love would expect, but in the end, Gilbert’s bumpy, less-expected journey is all the more fitting and human.
The letter is deeply self-indulgent and excruciating to read ... I was stunned that this solipsistic mess opens the book, because Gilbert is a terrific storyteller ... Gilbert keeps straining for that rhyme, trying to recapture an earlier magic ... She strings together self-help cliches with no invention, no curiosity about poetry, or anything, really, but herself ... The prose is clunky...and full of preposterous flourishes ... In contrast, Gilbert is at her best when she writes with self-awareness ... As a storyteller she shines brightest when she’s not curating, but displaying her mistakes, and mourning them ... And when, instead of simply emoting, she sits down to craft a scene, she writes transportingly. The last days of Rayya’s life, in a house with two of her exes, are funny, propulsive, raw and moving.
Where the self-effacing Gilbert of her former work shines through, this memoir dazzles, but the clumsy inclusion of photos, wobbly drawings and navel-gazing poems means that on the whole it over-revs ... All the Way to the River will satisfy Gilbert’s existing fans’ thirst for life updates, I’m sure, but read alone it’s unlikely to gain her many new ones.
It is easy to cringe, but it is this conviction that has made Gilbert into such a phenomenon. What makes her so hateable is also what makes her so effective: a total refusal of irony, an evangelical belief in the therapeutic value of disclosure ... Is Gilbert a narcissist? Of course she is. But so is every memoirist worth reading ... If there’s any terminal uniqueness here, it isn’t Gilbert’s, it’s her critics’, convinced their barbs are unprecedented, even as they repeat the same old charge against the one woman who’s already outlived it.
Fans of her more lighthearted memoir and novels may be shocked by this book’s intensity, but it’s a brave story with an ultimately hopeful outcome. Anyone who has faced addiction—or loved someone who has—will recognize and be moved by Gilbert’s journey.
Gilbert takes readers to a darker, more complicated space than many of her earlier works. This is a harrowing, vital, and ultimately transcendent exploration of fierce love, codependency, and grief ... The lessons Gilbert derives from her devastating experience are hard-won and devoid of platitudes. The central liberation she references in the book's subtitle is not a sudden, sun-drenched epiphany, but a slow, painful untangling of self from another in order to love more fully and more honestly.
Gilbert is a beloved and deeply talented writer, and many audiences will want to pick up her motivational new book, though the content is very personal and may not appeal to every self-help reader.
Narrated by Gilbert with an unflinching disregard for the preservation of her own reputation ... This honesty is refreshing, if disarmed somewhat by Gilbert’s warm, jocular tone that reminds the reader she is writing from a remove, having emerged from the darkness, once again, into light. The usual effervescence of Gilbert’s prose, a trademark of her literary sensibilities, has been sacrificed here somewhat in exchange for a chatty vernacular that is more akin to a friendly blog post ... It is fascinating...to read Gilbert’s revelations concerning her life during 'the flush and shiny post-Eat Pray Love years.'
Gilbert can be mordantly, self‑indictingly funny ... The harrowing quality of this descent is dark catnip for the reader: The more gothic things get, the more gripping the story becomes ... The question is whether Gilbert can pull it off. I’d say mostly yes, because she’s such a likable writer, matched by few in her sprezzatura on the page. Coherence isn’t entirely required when her goofy, self‑deprecating charm is so winning—at any rate it wins me ... Gilbert’s pop feminine style is unlofty to a fault. Perhaps it’s why her invite to the table of canonical American questers and seekers seems to have been lost in the mail ... But then there’s Gilbert’s ingenuous ability to yank you, out of the blue, to surprising uncharted places.
