Wild Card with Rachel Martin - Elizabeth Gilbert no longer believes she’s a bad person

Episode Date: September 4, 2025

Elizabeth Gilbert's 2006 memoir “Eat, Pray, Love” was about her journey of self-discovery in the aftermath of a painful divorce. It was a massive hit, but it wasn’t nearly the whole story. In her new book “All the Way to the River,” Gilbert examines her self-destructive patterns as she contends with addiction and grief. She and Rachel talk about learning to show herself and others mercy.To listen sponsor-free and support the show, sign up for Wild Card+ at plus.npr.org/wildcard. For handpicked podcast recommendations every week, subscribe to NPR’s Pod Club newsletter at npr.org/podclub.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Hey, it's Rachel. It can feel impossible to find your next favorite podcast. And hey, we are so glad that you're here listening to Wildcard. But when you want to switch it up, check out NPR's Pod Club newsletter. Sign up and you'll get fresh podcast recommendations every week handpicked by the people that live for this stuff. You can subscribe for free using the link in today's show notes or at npr.org slash podclub. I'd rather it wasn't. Mercifully. Mercifully. Mercifully. Yes. Yes, please. And that is also, I hope, how I not judge, but regard other.

I'm Rachel Martin, and this is Wildcard, the show where cards control the conversation. Each week, my guest answers questions about their life, questions pulled from a deck of cards. They're allowed to skip one question and to flip one back on me. My guest this week is Elizabeth Gilbert. That is a thing I used to believe about myself, that I was bad and wrong, and I don't believe that anymore. And even when I do things that fall short of my own very high expectations for myself, there's a way that I can now speak to myself very loving one and be like, you are now fundamentally bad and wrong.

It is hard to overstate what a big deal the book Eat, Pray, Love was when it came out almost 20 years ago. Elizabeth Gilbert's story then was raw and vulnerable in a way you just didn't hear a lot about at the time. It was a story of a woman buried under the weight of unmet expectations. He travels the world, discovers how to be happy and finds new love in the process. But here's the thing. As honest as she tried to be in that book, it wasn't nearly the whole story. Her newest book is another memoir, but this time the author has lived more life and has the benefit of seeing her patterns in hindsight.

It's a book about grief after losing her partner, but it's also about reckoning with her own addiction as she maps out a new way to live. It is a profoundly beautiful book. It's called All the Way to the River, and I am so glad to welcome Elizabeth Gilbert to Wildcard. Hi, thank you so much. Hi, I'm going to ask you to send me that introduction

because you just described the book so well. I'm so glad. I'm so glad. I'm so glad. And yes, and the context of Eat, Pray, Love, and all of it. So I am so happy to be here. Thank you. I love the show, and I'm delighted to be a guest.

Thank you for being game. And on that note, let's just play the game. What do you think about that? I mean, that's what we came to do. All right. You ready? Yep. Here we go.

First round, three cards. Memories. Two, please. Two, you knew right away. It's interesting. How long some people take and others are like, mm-mm. Two.

What's a routine from your childhood? that you miss? Oh, Sunday breakfasts. I grew up on a small family Christmas tree farm and my mom grew up on a big Midwestern dairy farm and my dad is a forester and

it was a very kind of traditional rural upbringing and my mom used to make these massive Sunday breakfast, farmer breakfasts that were insane. They were so good. Like waffles and pancakes and sausages and eggs like

multiple courses. Waffles and pancakes? Yeah, everything, all of it. It's like we would start with cereal. It was like cereal was the amused douche. It's like, yeah. So like, here, help yourself to a bowl of cereal while you're waiting for this other part of this giant nine-course breakfast. And also, the very best part of it was that we did a lot of berry picking in the summer. And my mom, my mom's an amazing farm woman. She knew how to can berries and make jams and make syrups. And so we had all these exotic things like elderberry syrup, like things that were not on the typical fair. I don't know. It was really fun. And if I had a friend over for sleepovers on a Saturday night, this was the reward because our family, we didn't have any heat in our house. My parents didn't

eat that home. And so coming to my house for a sleepover was kind of an adventure for my friends because they knew they were going to be cold. They knew they were going to have to do chores. But then there was this thing on Sunday morning, this payoff. And that was amazing. And I miss it very much. How many people were gathered at that table excluding your friends? Did you have siblings? It's just the four of us. Yeah. No, there was just, it was, we were a pretty small family, but we ate for like 20. It was great. And then we would kind of go into like a food coma. I mean, my mom jokes about it later. And she's like, we did have like these 30. thousand calorie breakfasts that were intended, like they come from a tradition of now you're

going to go plow the back 40, you know, but we didn't have a back 40. We had like a back two, you know, so like we didn't really have the physical labor to match the amount of food that we were eating. But it was fun and it was exciting. Okay, next one. Thank you for that. Thank you for that. One, two, or three. Three, please. Sorry. have you felt the most homesick? Never in a way of lonely for a particular house or even the people in the house. It's a terrible thing to say. But it's true like it's not. But I have always felt homesick. Wow. I mean, I don't know how to answer this except for spiritually. I think that I have been, I have always felt a deep, long. I mean, I don't know how to answer this except for spiritually. Like I think that I have been, I have always felt a deep longing that feels like homesickness for me for where I came from what created me and who I really am. Like that is like the sort of the most like deep existential homesickness. And I've spent, and I think I've always known I can't get that answered.

Like it's, that's not something that can be answered here in this realm, you know. So, yeah, I'm a traveler. So homesickness isn't a pathology that I have. The pathology I have is more longing for something other. You know, like, this isn't it. You know, like this place isn't the place. It's got to be somewhere else. Like, where's the next place that I'm going to live?

Where's the next place that I'm going to move to? Who's the person who's going to answer this deep sense of longing? So it's not, I'm not, I don't even really understand. I think what people mean when they talk about feeling homesick. I can feel home. I've experienced the opposite, which is feeling deeply oppressed and trapped in a home. And being like, I got to get out of here, like a kind of sickness for escape and a desire to be free. But yeah, I don't miss any, I don't miss any particular place ever. That's so interesting. I mean, there was a period of my life when I was also moving around a lot and did not want to be in one place and found myself feeling

very stuck if I existed in that same place for longer than like a year. I know it well. Yeah. You may be familiar. I've encountered that. And then I started thinking just in my mind, the image that came to me was that instead of like the lily pad, this is an unformed metaphor. I love, keep going, keep going, let's see where it goes. Yes, right, you're the writer. Okay, so instead of just like leapfrogging across, you know, lily pads to bliss, happiness, euphoria, excitement, ambition, all those things, that I decided at one point, it was really when I met my person who would become my husband to, because it was a little scary and then try to go down and see what I could excavate and if that would give me the same kind of. of euphoria to stand still and just be there and go deeper there and stay there. That's beautifully put.

Yeah, the same amount of spaciousness, vastness, curiosity, you know, an interest, but in one place rather than in all the places. Yeah. Yeah. That's beautiful. Yep. I guess my question to you is, obviously, everybody who read, eat, pray, love, millions and millions of people know you to be that vagabond. After, you did stay put for a while.

Did you not? Yes, I know. So my wonderful ex-husband is also a traveler. And so within the space of the 12 years that we were together, I think we lived in five different places. Oh. So we stayed put with each other. Yeah. At one point I lived in this beautiful, beautiful, beautiful Victorian house on the top of the hill that's like such a dream house.

And I started gardening and remembering everything my mother had taught me about gardening. And my parents are people who stay. You know, they've lived in, my parents have lived on the farm where I was raised for 52 years. Wow. And, you know, like they stick and stay. So I'm very different from them in that regard. But I remembered the joys of the garden. And like I want to do, I want to plant a fruit tree that won't bear fruit for 10 years.

Like there's a commitment in that. Anyway, and making this house so beautiful. And we made it so beautiful. And a friend of mine came and said, after all you've put into this house and how beautiful it is, you can never leave. And I was like, you have no idea what I'm capable of leaving. Hold my mirror. And the day came. like three years later I was like I don't want this anymore you know like buy garden by beautiful

house like I poured so much into it and then I was like no I'm done hey it's rachel before we get back to the show I'm hoping you can take a quick minute to leave us a rating or review on your podcast app it's an amazing way to support our show by helping more people find it shout out to kRS 1238 who left a review saying I love this show so much I recommend it to everyone I know and cry happy tears almost every episode. I've even started using the questions for discussions in the classroom with my high schoolers. I love that very much. If Wildcard has ever made you tear up or laugh out loud or just pause while you're washing the dishes to think about the meaning of life,

leave us a review and help spread the word. Okay. Thank you so much. Back to the show. Okay. So I want to push back from this game and talk about your book, which is, can I call it a masterpiece? I don't know. I love this book, Elizabeth. It's so beautiful. Thank you, sweet. And it feels very different from Eat, Pray, Love. There are a lot of people, you've had a varied career. You've written so many books and essays, but still a lot of people know you from Eat, Pray, Love. But this book, to me, feels like it has a similar potential. And I should just say it's called All the Way to the River. and but it has for me when I'm reading it I could see how it has life-changing potential for people.

Well, it was life-changing for me to write it. And the story of the book is about my relationship with my partner, Raya Elias, who was my best friend for many years, and then who I fell in love with and kept that secret even from me, certainly from her and definitely from my marriage. And then she was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer and liver cancer and given six months to live, at which point it was no longer physically emotionally or spiritually possible for me to continue to pretend that I was not in love with her. And it was actually essential that I go be her partner for the last months of her life. And what we both thought was going to be a sort of devastating and beautiful love story turned out to be very devastating, but for reasons beyond what the mirror, merely that somebody was dying of cancer. Raya was a heroin and cocaine addict with a long, long recovery who picked up her addiction again at the end of her life once she was a terminal cancer patient for reasons we all understood and then didn't die in the expected amount of time that was given and ended up living a year past what anyone expected she was. live. In a state, most of that type of heightened addiction.

Highened drug addiction. And if I had written that book right after she died, which I couldn't and somehow knew not to, I think it would have been the story of a very nice, me, a very nice person and a terrible thing that I went through. And I have just enough maturity and sort of self-awareness to know that there is no story that is quite as simple as I'm a really nice person and a bad thing happened to me. And the book is, when my friend Glennon Doyle read it, she said, this is a masterclass and self-accountability, which I think is the highest praise I could ever get because the entire book is an effort for me to be like, what is my part in this?

How did I end up in a situation where I was being so degraded, not just where somebody's addiction caused them to be so degraded, but where I was so. such a world-class enabler. Why again did I end up in a relationship where I was such a world-class enabler? Why do I keep ending up in relationships, not just romantic, but friendships? Why do I keep pouring myself into people and then blaming them for leaving me feeling empty? What is this? And over the course of the years since Rea died, a really beloved friend sat me down and said, who was an addict in recovery, in 12-step recovery, and was like, you know, there's a 12-step room for people like you. Like, there's 12-step rooms for people who suffer from sex and love addiction,

which is what it looks to me like you do, and maybe you might want to go get some help. And so the book is not only about my partner's addiction, but also about my addiction. It's exactly what Glennon told you, because I would be reading, and I would, and I would I would think to myself, this is so bad, and I would get angry at you. Elizabeth, I would get angry. I'm reading the book. I'm like, what? Don't, this is, these are, this is so many red flags in front of you.

And, and it, and then there would be a moment just after I, my anger would crest, and you would, you would interrogate your own behavior in this way that was so real and zero. percent performative. And I just found it incredibly moving and very courageous. It's a real courageous thing to do to put all your stuff out there and take. Thanks, sweetheart. I appreciate that. And I was smiling when you said there were so many red flags and I just got a big smile on my face because I heard somebody once in one of my 12-step recovery rooms say, whenever I see red flags, I think it's a parade in my honor. And I run toward it. I'm like, flags!

It's a parade! So, yes, that is not just what I did in this relationship. It's what I do. And it's what I seem to be powerless overdoing. How did you know it was the right time to put this down on the page? Because it was, Ray has been gone for, How long? Almost eight years.

So, yeah, it was about seven years after she died. And to be very honest, Raya told me to do it. You know, I mean, she wanted me to, she always wanted me to write about us, and she wanted me to write about her. And she was somebody who was incredibly candid about her own life. I mean, what I loved more than anything about Raya was her unflinching honesty when she was sober. And there was nobody who would go right to the white, hot, radioactive center of the truth faster than Raya did, which I love. loved in her. You know, she used to say the truth has legs. At the end of the day, it's the only thing that's going to be left standing. Everything else blows up with the truth. So all the other

stories are going to blow up and all the drama and all the trauma. It's all going to blow up. And the last thing left standing in the room is always going to be the truth. And since we're going to end up there, why don't we just start there? Let's just start with it. But on the morning of my 54th birthday, and the book begins with this, Reya visited me. Like I woke up and Rea's spirit was in the room, like as clearly as I'm talking to you, she was like, dude, sit down, write that book, go full punk rock with it. Don't worry about protecting my dignity. I'm dead. I don't need any dignity. Don't worry about protecting your dignity. It's of no use to anyone. Wow. You know, and I have a friend in 12-step who always says God can't use perfect people to help others, you know? And it's like the highest service that you could do is to tell the truth. truth about you. And it's time to do that now. So get to it. And I started writing the book that day. I can't let you talk about seeing Reya without asking you more about that. Because I know in the book, you also saw Raya's mom. You have the ability or you're open to seeing spirits, Elizabeth.

I don't actually, I want to be really clear. I don't see them. Tell me. I hear them. You hear them. I hear them. You're not conjuring an image. No, I don't see visions, but there have been times where I've been cracked open enough where it's been very clear, like, your sister's here, your mom's here, you know, like, and they want to say this. And I hear them saying it, and then they go. So, yeah, I don't pretend to understand it, but I do. But with Rea, particularly in the two years after she died, she was absolutely.

available to me. She was, she was, I said she's more vivid and present in life, in death than most people are in life. She was a very vivid and present person in life. She was incredible charisma. But, and the thing about vivid people is when they die, they don't seem to go away very fast. Like their vividness seems to remain. So, I mean, I could ask her anything, and I did. Like, we were in constant, constant conversation. That's not the case anymore. And, and that has faded, which is a little heartbreaking, but also I think is in a way the end of codependence. I think she's left because she can see that I can do my life now without making somebody else into my higher power. This is round two. This is about insights. I've already talked a lot about insights because

that's what happens when you write a memoir. Well, we'll talk more. One hopes. Okay. We'll see what these open up. One, two, or three. Three, please. What's something you thought about yourself that you had to unlearn? Oh, I'll share one that I'm still in the process of unlearning. I'm afraid I'm not a good person. I'm afraid that I'm fundamentally a bad person. I'm afraid that there's something fundamentally wrong and dark and bad about me.

And it is so deep in the groundwater of my being that I'm in the words I would use to identify as fundamentally bad and wrong, that I'm fundamentally bad and wrong. And there's been nothing anybody could ever tell me that would dislodge that. And no amount of merited action on my part of giving and loving and sharing and being generous and being kind could dislodge this deep fundamental fear that I am not good. And I... Even though you tried. I mean, you write in the book, your generosity is beyond. But you give with abandon to strangers.

I just want to be good. I just want to be good. I just want to be a good person. And whatever wounding that I have that I either sort of that my spirit came in with or that I picked up in trauma from childhood or that I picked up in trauma from culture has indeed caused me to act sometimes in ways that are objectively not good in terms of this is a harm. this is harming another human being. You know, this is using a person for something or exploiting a person in a certain way.

But anyway, recovery is all about learning how to not do that. But I actually don't believe that anymore. So I think that that's a huge, like I don't believe that I'm not a good person. I believe that I am a good person. and that's new. Like that's new, like just, that's like been a part of recovery. It's a part of, it's a part of like recovering my true nature. And my true nature is that I'm very sweet and very kind and very loving and good.

I'm a good one. And it's taken me a really long time to learn that. And it's taking me a lot of healing to get to that. So that is a thing I used to believe about myself that I was bad and wrong, and I don't believe that anymore. And even when I do things that fall short of my own very high expectations for myself, there's a way that I can now speak to myself very lovingly and be like, you are not bad and wrong. You are not fundamentally bad and wrong. you are a lovely innocent child of the world who made a mistake and that's okay and so it's taken me years to learn how to find that tenderness and compassion toward myself

that was a simple quiet question yeah that was a good one okay one two or three One, please. What's your relationship to pain? Not a fan. Zero out of five stars is my review. Super pain avoidant. Not courageous about physical pain. Never was.

I knew that I would never be an athlete, even though I had some athletic skill. You can't be an athlete if you're as afraid of pain as I am. So that's why I went to theater in high school instead of doing sports, because I went into every single sports encounter thinking of all the ways that I could get hurt and not wanting to be hurt. And pain avoidant emotionally as well in many ways. And it's been a great teacher. And the very things that I have most not wanted to feel are the portals through which I'm, I have grown and evolved. And so it does seem to be in this realm on this planet a non-negotiable part of the experience.

Isn't it though? Isn't it though? It really does. Nobody seems to care for it, but it seems like you don't get to do this world without it. Yeah. Through new cards. One, two or three. Two, please.

Are you good at forgetting? forgiveness? Depends. You know, I'll say there's a word I like better than forgiveness because I do think that forgiveness there's a trap that's inherent in it, which is there can be an arrogance and a superiority on the part of the person forgiving the miscreant. It's like I'm, I am the good and isn't party. I hand this to you. I hand this to you even though you did not even ask for it. That is how good I am. Because I am that good. So there can be a real piousness. The word I like better is mercy because I actually almost always get tears in my eyes when I even hear that word or feel what that word does to me. Forgiveness feels like a sort of job. Whereas mercy feels like I would rather sit with somebody in a shared space of mercy, which is,

I am sitting with you in the shared recognition of what a difficult thing it is to be a human being. And how much mercy is needed for us to be able to move through this Earth School curriculum with one another and just be like, yeah, it's also hard for me to be here. And I think that's slightly different from forgiveness. To me, we're equal. Like mercy feels like, look, it's, look, it's too. two souls looking at each other and being like, not an easy assignment to be embodied on this planet. I get it there.

And to me, what makes the amends process of 12 step, the most sublime spiritual experience I've ever had is that because of the way that I've been taught to offer amends by a sponsor who's really masterful at it, like I've been able to have that exact conversation with some people who I thought there is no way on earth this is ever going to be addressed there's no way on earth that this wound will ever heal that i never want to see them again they never want to see me again and we have actually been able to say wow that was hard wasn't it yeah you know that was hard and so to be able to do that before you die and i actually and i'm forgiving enough of myself and others i don't expect that i will have lived a non-emission like an admission

is free life. I think I'll probably go to my grave and there will still be some people that I have not been able to reach that level of healing with in person. But I trust fully that we'll get around to it. You know, we might have to do it next time. And we might do it, you know, we might do it differently next time. So, yeah, we got all the time in the universe. It doesn't all have to be solved today. Thank God.

Thank God. My God. I'm trying, but thank God. Elizabeth, run round three. We still have to do the beliefs round. Okay, here we go. One, two, or three? Two. I feel like, okay, I'm not going to prejudge it. You can skip it or flip it. How have your feelings about God changed over time? I'll say a quick answer and then I kind of would love to hear yours. I have always loved God, which is weird because I didn't grow up with much religion or maybe that's why. I always like instinctively, first. time I heard about God, I was like, I get it, I love it, I'm here for it, I believe in it, I've always believed in it, I see nothing but evidence of it, you know, and so I always felt this, I always felt this great love for God, not necessarily even knowing what that meant. What I didn't

feel was trust of God. So I believed God and I loved God and I thought God was amazing, and I pursued God and I went on spiritual journeys looking for God, but I never, ever, ever, ever, ever trusted God. I was like, I'll handle my life, thank you. I got this. At best, I felt like we were colleagues. This is like your work friend. Yeah, yeah, I love your work.

And now I'm just going to go over here and do things my way. And what's changed is a deepening of trust that perhaps they're, there may be an intelligence in the universe greater than mine. And perhaps I don't even know what I'm looking at when I'm looking at things and judging them. It's very possible that I don't even know what I'm looking at. And so maybe I should just see how God handles this. So there's a lot more trust. And what about you? It changed immensely. God was very much a part of my upbringing, very religious family. God was alive in our world, and I could not find that for myself. And I had too many other questions.

But I also like, I feel homesick, getting back to the homesick question, without a sense of God, if that makes sense. Yes, it does. So I play fast and loose with the term God. I don't really know what it is. I know there's something bigger than me. I try to find language to explain it to my kids and fail. I know you in your book, you just say it is just love. I call God love.

And that feels simplistic but also appropriate to me. So it is a work in progress for me. That's beautifully expressed. My beloved friend, Rob Bell, who used to have a, he wrote a book called Love Wins. He used to be a mega church minister. He had a church in Michigan with 10,000 people in it. Now he just surfs. It doesn't do any of that anymore. God does love him. He had to leave the church because he couldn't reconcile all the questions and things that you've addressed with what he's. But he has this beautiful line. He says, life is not a mystery to be solved, but a mystery to be lived in.

And I think what I hear you saying is that you live in those questions and learning to live in mystery and learning to live in doubt and learning to live in, this isn't quite working for me, but I don't want to throw the whole thing away either. Like you're living in the mystery. Yeah. One, two, or three? Two. How do you think your life should be judged? I'd rather it wasn't. Mercifully.

Mercifully. Mercifully. Yes. Yes, please. And that is also, I hope, how I not judge, but regard others. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, since that one was short, I'm going to ask one more.

One, two, or three. you pick it oh the old dealer's choice okay fine i'm going to pick this one when do you feel most connected to the people you've lost when i'm in my integrity um like when i feel like they would approve not that not that they're judging me but just that i like the way the buddh just talk about skilled and unskilled choices rather than right and wrong choices. You know, they're not like, that was a bad thing you did. They'll be like, that was an unskilled thing that you did. It's like, that is such a merciful way to do it, right? It's like, that was unskilled, you know, and lots of times, you know, part of my ongoing spiritual journey

is to when I'm unskilled as quickly as I notice it to see if I can make that right, you know, and say to somebody, like, the thing I just said isn't exactly, that wasn't at the level that I would like it to be. You know, can we try that again? When I've managed to get through a day and remain relatively skilled at the way that I speak, the way that I regard others, what I give, the boundaries that I set, how I speak those, that's when I feel them. And it's like this council, you know, who are like, good job, Lizzie. You know, you're doing good. It's hard and you're doing good. Like that's when I feel that and when I feel that sort of deep love and approval, it's really sweet.

We end the show the same way every time with a trip in our memory time machine in which you pick one moment from your past to revisit. It is not a moment you would change anything about. it's just a moment you would like to linger in a little longer. I would go back to 1978, 1977, my grandparents' home in upstate New York, dinner. All the men in my family at that point still active alcoholics. Not where I thought you were going. Those nights were so wild. Those people, those guys were so wild.

My great-grandfather, my grandfather, my uncle, my other uncle, my dad, drinking like monsters. And they were all hilarious. And being a little kid and being like, just having this knowing that my family was very special because they were so funny. And my grandmother's still alive sitting there maybe smoking, throwing out a funny comment. having a bit, everyone's drinking. I just want to say. It's a weird memory time machine for a recovering addict. I know, but it also goes a long way toward explaining why I have always been drawn to people who are wild and charismatic and ungovernable. And actually, I love the memory because I had a feeling that I was very lucky to be there. That I was very lucky to be a little girl who got to sit at

the grown-up table because there was no distinction made in my family of like, of like, you shouldn't talk about these subjects because there's an eight-year-old child in the room. Like nobody was going out of their way to be concerned about protecting the virgin ears of this tiny little girl, right? I was hearing jokes that were so filthy. I was hearing stories that were so inappropriate and the roars of laughter and the sense of grown-upness, you know, that was that I got to be part of. And that then I went out in the world. and I became a bartender and I worked on ranches and I was always comfortable around wild people

and around wild men and around drinking. I would love to see all of those people again. And I would love to see them all when they were totally out of control and when no one was holding it together because there was something spectacular. All the way to the river is available September 9th. Elizabeth, thank you, thank you so much.

Thank you. It has been an absolute joy. Thanks for having it. If you like that conversation, you should go back and check out my episode with Anne Patchett. Her answer about why she's still a Catholic, despite all of her reservations about the church, is one of my very favorite answers on this show. This episode was produced by Summer Tomad and edited by Dave Blanchard. It was mastered by Maggie Luthor.

Wildcard's executive producer is Yolanda Sangweni, and our theme music is by Romteen Arableau. You can reach out to us at Wildcard at npr.org. And you know what we're going to do. We're going to shuffle the deck and be back with more next week. Talk to you then.