This message is brought to you by Pushkin Industries with the audiobook Douglas Adams,

The Ends of the Earth.

Explore the mind of the beloved science fiction writer who foresaw both the digital age and

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Available wherever you get audiobooks.

This is Fresh Air.

I'm Tanya Mosley.

And my guest today is Elizabeth Gilbert. Her 2006 memoir,

Eat, Pray, Love, made her famous for a particular kind of longing for reinvention,

turning a year of post-divorce travel into a cultural phenomenon with millions of readers,

a spinoff industry, and a film starring Julia Roberts.

Her latest book, All the Way to the River, is almost the reverse. It immerses the reader into

caregiving, addiction, grief, and loss, with some critics raising ethical questions about its

framing and the choice to write in great detail about her late

partner's most private moments. The book tells the story of Gilbert's relationship with Rea

Elias, first her hairstylist and friend, and later her lover, who died of pancreatic and liver

cancer in 2018. Gilbert writes about leaving her marriage for Rea, the devotion and the chaos of

that love, and her own dangerous impulses, lavishly spending on friends, enabling Rea's

addictions, and in a moment of despair, even plotting to end Rea's life. Those confessions

make the memoir as intimate as it is shocking. In addition to

Eat, Pray, Love, Gilbert is also the author of several works, including The Signature of All Things,

City of Girls, and Big Magic. Elizabeth Gilbert, welcome to fresh air. Thank you so much, Tanya. I'm very

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