Hello, I'm Gilbert Cruz.

And I'm Jimana Keteep.

We are both editors at the New York Times Book Review, and this is part two of our fall book preview.

Last week, we talked about Dan Brown and Thomas Pynchon and Kieran Desai and a bunch of other big fiction books.

This week, we are looking at several of the major nonfiction titles coming out over the next several months.

How do you feel about our last episode, Chumad?

So, listeners, I haven't listened to it yet.

Just feelings.

Just how to you walked out feeling great.

I walked out feeling excited. There's objectively a lot of good stuff coming. So what's the first thing you're going to, do you even know? I do. Okay. Yes, of course I know. I am nothing if not prepared. Just as a big old asterisk, I'm going to be talking about a lot of memoirs today. Memoir, if we want to

use the Chris Jenner preferred pronunciation. I don't think we do. Okay, it's funny. All right, so we're

going to start with a name that's probably very familiar to a lot of you who are listening.

And this is the latest memoir by Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat, Pray, Love,

notoriety. This is a big shift for her in a lot of ways. So this is called All the Way to the

River. And luckily, this book is already out. This is a pretty wrenching personal account. And she's written about this relationship in various

forms before, but now she's put it together in a book. So her best friend, Raya Elias,

she realized that she received a terminal cancer diagnosis when she was in her, I think, late 40s, early 50s.

And that was the kind of shock that both women needed to realize that they were in love with each other, much more than just best friends.

And so Elizabeth left her marriage, moved in with Raya.

They had this incandescent, but also very tumultuous, romantic relationship that, of course, is just amplified by the stress of knowing that Raya's life is going to end.

And just to add another complication, both of these women were grappling with addiction, and they were in recovery, but I think that also the intensity of their relationship elicited some of their worst impulses.

So Raya actually had an amazing life.

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