Lemonada.

Hi, it's Elise Loonen, host of Pulling the Thread.

Today I'm talking to Liz Gilbert, who has a new memoir out, which she describes as the most excavating and the most searching thing she's ever written.

Okay. thing she's ever written. Hi, it's Elise Loonan, host of Pulling the Thread. On this show, we pull apart the web in which

we all live to understand who we are

and why we're here. My hope is that these conversations spark moments of resonance and plant tiny

seeds of awareness so that we might all collectively learn and grow. Here is today's guest, Liz Gilbert,

talking about how she used her partner as a bodyguard and a savior and what happened when she no longer could.

I borrowed so much strength from her, but she used to say, I will not rest until I see you standing on your own two feet in every single situation of your life.

And what better way for her to offer me the gift of learning how to do that than to remove

herself from the position of being my higher power and actually become somebody really

dangerous to me, who I had to figure out how to defend myself against?

Elizabeth Gilbert is the mega bestselling author of several books, including,

of course, eat, pray, love, and big magic. Her new memoir is called All the Way to the River,

love, loss, and liberation. It's about her relationship with her late partner and very close friend

Raya, who died several years ago. It is a story of addiction and recovery for both

Raya and Liz, and it's about what happened when Raya relapsed as she was dying and what has

happened for Liz since then. It's beautiful, dark, funny, and incredibly illuminating. Even though

Liz's story sounds quite rare at first, today we talk

about how many of us have experienced something similar, a chapter in our lives where, as Liz

says, you look back and wonder, what just happened? How did I end up here? Where did the ground go

beneath my feet? Liz shares her process of answering these questions and what she learned from the patterns

...