Elizabeth Gilbert met Rayya Elias in 2000. In this memoir she tells how their friendship became love, how addiction ran through it on both sides, and the grief that followed.

Readical Key Points

• An Oprah's Book Club pick and an instant New York Times bestseller, according to the publisher
• Starred reviews from Booklist and Publishers Weekly; also reviewed in Kirkus Reviews and Library Journal
• Content note: addiction, a partner's cancer and bereavement; one person's account, not a treatment guide or a substitute for professional care
• Hardcover, 400 pages, from Riverhead Books

Gilbert follows the relationship from friendship into romance and into the years when addiction had hold of them both. The publisher frames it as the story of a friend who had shown Gilbert her own self-destructive patterns and then became the partner she repeated them with. The book carries the story through Rayya's illness and the loss that came after, and on toward the liberation named in its subtitle.

The publisher calls it Gilbert's first nonfiction in ten years and addresses it to anyone who has been held captive by love or by a substance or craving. Readers who came to Gilbert through Eat Pray Love or Big Magic will find her writing here about love, addiction and loss. Gilbert writes the story as one of its two addicts, not as a witness to it.

About the Author

Elizabeth Gilbert wrote Eat Pray Love and Big Magic. According to her publisher, her nine earlier books of fiction and nonfiction have together passed 25 million copies in worldwide sales and appeared in more than fifty languages. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Hemingway Award.

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