In recovery circles, there’s a phrase for it: “terminal uniqueness”. It means believing your suffering is unprecedented, that your story is so particular, so exceptional, that the usual nostrums of therapy don’t apply to you. In literary circles, such a diagnosis is reserved for the lucky woman memoirist deemed to be an indefensibly indulgent shrew. Karl Ove Knausgaard wrote over a million words about himself in My Struggle. The minutiae of his life, according to the New York Times, were “feats of shame and openness”, “vital,” he was a “magician”. Rachel Cusk wrote one memoir about her divorce, Aftermath, and Camilla Long in The Sunday Times memorably called her “a brittle little dominatrix and peerless narcissist”. That was 13 years ago, and she has not written another memoir since.
Cusk must have breathed a sigh of relief this week as she handed over the baton. Elizabeth Gilbert’s new book, All the Way to the River, received a similar universal battering. Critics don’t just roll their eyes at Gilbert – they loathe her. Every major newspaper across the globe called it the work of a “self-indulgent narcissist”, whose “solipsistic” and “saccharine” introspection exploits her late partner’s memory. The New York Times, The Guardian and anywhere you looked except Oprah Magazine agreed that Gilbert had slipped, once again, into terminal uniqueness. The subtext: please, for the love of God, stop sharing.
She doesn’t seem bothered. Shame, which shadows so much memoir-writing, is conspicuously absent from Gilbert’s. The book follows her falling in love with her best friend Rayya Elias after she is diagnosed with cancer. A recovered drug addict, Elias falls back into addiction, getting Gilbert to buy the cocaine she’d found sober relief from, because it’s “prescribed by a doctor”, and so begins a spiral of addiction. To Gilbert, a hungry “co-dependent”, Elias is a “godlike figure”, but even she reaches her limit, plotting to kill Elias with morphine pills. She leaves Elias, then returns in time for the final weeks of her life. Gilbert calls herself a sex and love addict, guilty of “over-giving” until she neared annihilation. It’s certainly far from the sparky meditations of Eat, Pray, Love, the tome that pacified a million divorcées.
In one of her previous memoirs, Big Magic, Gilbert tells an absurd story which is key to understanding her. She is “visited by a big idea” out of the blue – why doesn’t she write a novel about a middle-aged woman going to the Amazon jungle, trying to find the boss she’s secretly in love with? She sells the book and gets excited about it. But life gets in the way, and the novel gets lost. Years later, when she befriends the novelist Ann Patchett, she discovers Patchett has written a novel with the exact same plotline. She’s not suspicious, that’s big magic! Writing, Gilbert realises, is visited upon us from a higher power, and it is our job, as good writers, to just listen when it arrives. Gilbert didn’t listen, Patchett did, and so went the cosmic grace of the universe.
Gilbert really believes this. It’s why All The Way To The River begins with a scene where Elias visits Gilbert from beyond the grave, and tells her: “Baby dude… you need to write the fuck out of our story”. It is easy to cringe, but it is this conviction that has made Gilbert into such a phenomenon. What makes her so hateable is also what makes her so effective: a total refusal of irony, an evangelical belief in the therapeutic value of disclosure. We can only assume it was why her publishing team, who were so cautious they pulled her 2023 novel just because it was set in Russia, allowed her to draw little pictures of dandelions next to passages describing harrowing cocaine binges. She writes with so much ego that she has become egoless; she treats herself as an apostle, chosen by God, “magic”. However unbearable, it strikes me as just as interesting a reason to write so much about yourself as whatever drove Knausgaard to his indulgences, or the lauded memoirist Blake Butler to pillage his dead wife’s diaries in his grief-stricken Molly. You cannot write a good memoir without believing you have something to say.
People worry about the “death of literature” and the “end of spirituality”, but Gilbert has created a universe of mid-life female writers, women like Glennon Doyle, Cheryl Strayed, Miranda July, and Brené Brown, who sell their particular blend of spirituality and therapeutic reinvention to millions upon millions of readers. Some might call them scammers; pitching their own life experiences as lessons in how to live, but they sell more books than those who win the Booker Prize, or even the Nobel. Women read their books and change their lives. They leave their husbands, quit their jobs and start over. Those that sneer at sentimentalism sneer at the readers that make up her empire.
We’re living in the world Gilbert made. She was the original wellness influencer: she “journaled”, meditated, turned her life into content. It’s why Eat Pray Love appeals to a chronically online 15-year-old as much as her fed up menopausal mother. Is Gilbert a narcissist? Of course she is. But so is every memoirist worth reading. If there’s any terminal uniqueness here, it isn’t Gilbert’s, it’s her critics’, convinced their barbs are unprecedented, even as they repeat the same old charge against the one woman who’s already outlived it.
[See also: The chicks who dig Luigi Mangione]
Content from our partners
Related
Join the debate
Subscribe here to comment