All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation

When Rayya was present, Gilbert lost her fear of other people and her need to manage and please everyone all the time. This experience made her realize how frightened she had always been of other people being upset or unhappy. She recalls an extraordinary scene at a funeral in which Rayya walked up to someone everyone considered a “criminal, a possible killer, a drug addict, a menace” and kindly asked him how he was doing (87). Rayya was capable of deep empathy because she had also lost her true self to addiction, behaving in cruel and violent ways while knowing inside that she was good. The young man left abruptly, and Rayya subtly told everyone to lock their valuables in their cars, since he was a known thief. After the event, Rayya explained that she had wanted to protect the young man from the guilt and shame of stealing at his grandmother’s funeral. She knew how awful it felt to steal from family, as she had stolen from her sick father to finance her heroin addiction. Gilbert fell in love with Rayya because of her deep compassion.

Gilbert grieves for Rayya and ponders the nature of being and reality. She discusses the surreal experience of grief and suddenly losing a vibrant presence in one’s life. Gilbert wonders what the world is made of and why it is always expanding, suggesting that grieving and sorrow are inherent parts of being alive in the universe.

Gilbert fell in love with Rayya while married to her second husband. She kept her feelings a secret, and she describes this secrecy as a component of her addiction. People keep their addictions hidden in order to protect and maintain them, while also maintaining their public, respectable selves. Gilbert recalls how her love, attachment and dependence on Rayya grew rapidly when she began staying at Gilbert’s second home. Rayya’s confidence and honesty made her a perfect sounding board for Gilbert, whose personal life was full of drama and difficult friends and business relationships. Gilbert became dependent on Rayya’s advice and reassurance, and their relationship became increasingly codependent as they leaned on each other in different ways.

Gilbert regrets not being more brutally honest with her husband and Rayya as she felt her attachment to her friend spin out of her control. Avoiding the discomfort of confrontation and hard talks, Gilbert instead invited Rayya to continue living at her second home, telling her she should use the time to write a book. Looking back, Gilbert is deeply ashamed that instead of being honest about her dependence on Rayya, she hid her desire to have her needs met behind a gesture of kindness. Gilbert’s insistence that Rayya write a book and her promise to help her get it published were, in hindsight, an attempt to pull the strings of Rayya’s life for Gilbert’s benefit. She wonders how Rayya might have been using her, too, and acknowledges that Rayya’s financial precarity made it difficult for her to turn down Gilbert’s unusual offer.

Gilbert writes in verse as God speaking directly to her. God acknowledges her restlessness and inner pain, which has manifested as a lifetime of searching for new teachers, soulmates, places and accomplishments. God asks her to try being herself and feeling at home in the world, telling her she does belong here.

Gilbert clarifies that she and Rayya were both good people who did genuinely care for each other. She ponders the line between love addiction and typical love, deciding that it can be found in the “level of intensity” in people’s feelings of “urgency, dependency, and desperation” (104). If these feelings are intense and lead to obsession and harm, Gilbert characterizes this as a love addiction.

Gilbert’s friendship with Rayya came at a cost to Gilbert’s marriage and to both of their other friendships. While Gilbert was not unfaithful to her husband, she feels she was slowly replacing him with Rayya; Rayya was her partner at public events and her constant confidante. Meanwhile, Gilbert and Rayya sometimes neglected their other friendships because of their intense commitment to each other. Gilbert kept her dependence on Rayya a secret from her husband, Rayya, and to some extent, herself. But Rayya had a secret too: she had begun drinking again. Even as she was writing her book about her recovery from addiction, Rayya had begun keeping small bottles of bitters in her fridge, at friends’ houses, and even in her purse or handbag. Bitters are highly alcoholic spirits typically used  for mixing cocktails. When Gilbert asked Rayya about the bitters, Rayya claimed that a doctor had prescribed them for digestion and that they were non-alcoholic. At the time, Gilbert could not confront the fact that Rayya was lying and had returned to being actively addicted to alcohol, since she had placed Rayya on a pedestal and thought of her as her “place of safety” (111). In this way, their addictions intersected perfectly: Rayya was addicted to alcohol, and Gilbert was addicted to Rayya and the idea of her perfection.

In 2013, both Gilbert and Rayya experienced professional successes when their books were published. Gilbert’s novel, The Signature of All Things, was met with critical acclaim, while Rayya’s story of addiction and recovery, Harley Loco, was similarly praised. The friends’ lives were as enmeshed as ever, as they travelled together to promote their work. Gilbert became increasingly uncomfortable with her now very public friendship with Rayya, as it made it harder for her to disguise her intense attachment to her friend. Gilbert and Rayya supported each other on the road, each filling in for the other’s weaknesses: Gilbert coached Rayya on how to be interviewed, while Rayya defended Gilbert from criticism. By the end of the year, the two were on a professional high, but Gilbert recalls how underneath it all they were both “full of barely contained secrets” (118).

Writing in verse, Gilbert contrasts quitting with recovery, presenting quitting as a temporary choice requiring some willpower and mental tricks or coping strategies, while recovery requires total surrender and humility.

In 2013, Rayya told Gilbert that her family in Detroit had staged a “reverse intervention” in which they asked her to drink wine with them, insisting that she was cured of her addictions (122). She asked Gilbert if she would judge her for her drinking, insisting that she had never been addicted to alcohol and only wanted to have a glass of wine with dinner. Rayya expressed resentment towards her recovery friends, who adopted AA’s emphasis on complete sobriety, and she kept her casual drinking a secret from them to avoid their judgment. Gilbert recalls how her infatuation with Rayya, and her desperation for her to be perfect, was so intense that she immediately accepted Rayya’s implausible and disconcerting explanations. Indeed, she ordered her a glass of wine there and then.

With the benefit of hindsight, Gilbert can see that she was enabling Rayya’s addiction out of her infatuation and her habit of overgiving. Now that she has access to Rayya’s diaries, Gilbert knows that Rayya was drinking secretly for years before she told Gilbert about it. Rayya’s spiral into heavy drinking causes Gilbert to feel guilty. She wonders if by encouraging her to relocate to New Jersey, separating herself from her sober community in New York and isolating her in a small town, challenged her mental health and encouraged her addiction. However, Gilbert also acknowledges that she is prone to taking responsibility for others’ choices and that Rayya was a strong-willed person with her own agency. Gilbert feels that addicts like her and Rayya are like “runaway trains” that it takes a miracle to stop (130).

In a poem, Gilbert reflects on the grief and anger that she has experienced while confronting her addiction. In her recovery meetings she has learned from others that merely channeling willpower towards her problem will not resolve her addiction. Instead, what is required is complete surrender, and the acknowledgement that Gilbert cannot control the world or even every aspect of her own life.

Gilbert continually wrestles with her desire to keep certain thoughts and fantasies secret from others. She works with a therapist and spends time in group recovery meetings to consistently share her real feelings, which she identifies as an essential part of overcoming her addictive behavior. She feels that she is currently “clean” from her addiction, as she has not used another person for companionship, reassurance, sex or other validation for a few years.

The author explores the history of Alcoholics Anonymous, explaining that its founder William Griffith Wilson, known in AA circles as Bill W., consulted psychologist Carl Jung, who advised him to find faith in a higher power—a dictum that became central to the AA philosophy. Gilbert clarifies that this advice is not religiously prescriptive, and she is inspired by how addicts have different notions of God and spirituality that comfort and motivate them in their journey. Gilbert sees this as a crucial foundation to recovery from addiction, suggesting that it is the reason why Alcoholics Anonymous remains the most effective recovery program in the US today. She connects this discussion to Rayya’s own relapse into drinking in the years before her death, arguing that Rayya wanted to control her own life instead of listening for God’s voice to guide her.

Gilbert’s short poem reads “For once in your life / let the butter cut the knife” (145).

In 2016 Rayya went for a liver scan in preparation for trying a new treatment for her Hepatitis C. She was shocked to learn that she had over a dozen tumors on her liver and pancreas, and immediately knew she did not have much longer to live. Stunned by the news, she called Gilbert to tell her.

Rayya’s horrific news hit Gilbert hard. As she was confronted with the near certainty of Rayya’s death, she realized that she couldn’t bear to keep pretending that she was merely a friend. She confessed her real feelings to her husband, and they agreed to divorce. Gilbert grieved Rayya’s passing and the immense loss she would feel for the rest of her life. She knew that her whole life would change in order for her to live out her truth of wanting to be with Rayya.

In a poem addressed to Rayya and written a year after her passing, Gilbert expresses her grief for Rayya, which has intensified once again. Gilbert recalls being strong and stoic as she handled the mundane matters of Rayya’s death, dealing with bureaucracy, interview questions, and sorting through her things. She reveals how hard it is to grieve without the comfort of the person she is grieving, and wonders why people live and die.

Gilbert remembers finally telling Rayya the truth about her romantic love for her. Her hopes were confirmed when Rayya admitted that she felt the same way, and the two were relieved to be unburdened of this long-kept mutual secret.