Liz Gilbert Shares the Whole Story for the First Time
May 10, 2022
Liz Gilbert:
Oh my God.
Liz Gilbert:
Hi.
Abby Wambach:
This is so exciting.
Liz Gilbert:
All of my favorite people in one place. How did this happen?
Liz Gilbert:
Hi, Amanda.
Amanda Doyle:
Hi.
Glennon Doyle:
Wait a minute, has sister and Liz ever talked to each other’s faces in real life?
Liz Gilbert:
Yeah.
Amanda Doyle:
In Naples, Florida during one of… Do you remember… Twice. Yes. During our Love Flash Mob.
Amanda Doyle:
We all sat around that table and God bless Liz Gilbert, she contacted every single person in her phone.
Liz Gilbert:
Yes, Amanda and I met because I drove to Naples and we did the little, most home spun fundraiser. We sat at the kitchen table, at your kitchen table, and Amanda fed me nonstop Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.
Amanda Doyle:
That’s right.
Glennon Doyle:
So We Can Do Hard Things loves, welcome to the most exciting day. It’s the most wonderful day of the world because we are celebrating our first birthday. Today will make a year of We Can Do Hard Things. We’re one year old. I feel like developmentally we’re ahead of schedule.
Glennon Doyle:
Well at least two developmentally and for a birthday gift to all of you people who have just helped us create this really amazing community, we have a gift for you. The gift for you that we’re giving you-
Abby Wambach:
Actually, she’s giving us.
Glennon Doyle:
You know what? Is the person who has been one of the greatest gifts of my entire life.
Abby Wambach:
True.
Glennon Doyle:
And that person is Elizabeth Gilbert.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. Elizabeth Gilbert is a gift to the world. She is the author of the international bestseller, Eat Pray Love, which has been translated into over 30 languages and sold over 12 millions copies worldwide.
Abby Wambach:
Oh my gosh.
Glennon Doyle:
The book became so popular that Time Magazine named Elizabeth as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
Glennon Doyle:
In 2010, Elizabeth published a follow up to Eat Pray Love called, Committed. An instant number one New York times bestseller as well as, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear. She is author of two novels, The Signature of All Things, and City of Girls, and she’s the creator of the Onward Book Club, which takes place on her Instagram via live chat as a way of spotlighting, studying, and celebrating the work of Black women authors.
Glennon Doyle:
Elizabeth divides her time between New York city, rural New Jersey, and everywhere else.
Abby Wambach:
Now we can just get into the talking.
Glennon Doyle:
Hi, Liz. Welcome to, We Can Do Hard Things.
Abby Wambach:
I love this part.
Liz Gilbert:
Hi guys. I love you all so very much and congratulations on being a year old.
Glennon Doyle:
Thank you.
Liz Gilbert:
How does it feel?
Glennon Doyle:
It feels exciting. I have to tell you, I did not expect for this project to become so incredibly important to me. I have found a way of being through this podcast. I feel like as a writer, I was constantly just trying to drudge up stuff from inside of me and now I’m every week, every day I’m taking in things. Beautiful ideas from people, and books, and interviews, and thinking about them.
Glennon Doyle:
Then doing this thing that I think I love to do, which is what is this person here to teach us? How can I get that to the pod squad in an hour? It’s really a very cool way of life for me.
Abby Wambach:
I know and Liz people recognize me more from the podcast than my soccer days, which is so amazing. People are like, “Oh my gosh, I love your podcast.” I was so nervous about the rest of my life. Like what would I be?
Liz Gilbert:
Right, I remember?
Abby Wambach:
What would my identity be? And now I’m a freaking podcast host.
Liz Gilbert:
Second acts, third acts, fourth acts in our lives. Oh, that’s wonderful. It’s so good to see all your faces.
Glennon Doyle:
We wanted to have you on for so long. We are very, very dear and good friends. I never ever want to ask you to do anything. That’s a hard line for me.
Glennon Doyle:
When we were talking the other day and then we decided to just get on today, and then I sent you a lot of emails and texts about notes and outlines and-
Abby Wambach:
Welcome to my world, Liz.
Glennon Doyle:
Until you stopped me and said, “Glennon, we know how to talk to each other. We are friends.”
Liz Gilbert:
Glennon, we’re friends. If I was at your house, I would walk into your house and for the next 72 hours, we wouldn’t stop talking. I’m not concerned that we’re going to run out of material.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s wild my obsession with over planning-
Abby Wambach:
How did you guys meet?
Glennon Doyle:
You tell your version first.
Liz Gilbert:
I first met Glennon online because back when we were all on Facebook, somebody was forwarding along something that you had written on Momastery that was about having gratitude for your kitchen the way that it was because apparently you had showed some images of your kitchen and people had been like, “You know you can renovate that and you can fix that.”
Liz Gilbert:
All of a sudden you had gone into some spasm of terror that your kitchen wasn’t good enough for the world in some way. Then you went around and it was such an incredible piece of writing. What I loved about it was not only that it was such a great piece of thinking because you were sharing about how here’s what I have gratitude for in my kitchen.
Liz Gilbert:
One thing I remembered was that you opened up a shelf full of vitamins, and you’re like, “This is full of vitamins, not medication for sick children. None of my children are sick.” It was this depth of gratitude for everything that you had and everything that was not going wrong in your life. It was also really funny and it was really smart. It was the first time I ever saw you.
Liz Gilbert:
There was a picture of you and your family and I started following you and I forwarded it around. I’m just going to go ahead, I take a lot of credit because there was this little moment between when I discovered you and the world discovered you. I was selling you hard.
Liz Gilbert:
I remember being at a meeting at Oprah Magazine and I was like, “Do you all know who Glennon Doyle Melton is?” Just looking at these blank faces and I was like, “This person needs to be on your radar. She should be writing for O.” I know it wasn’t true because you already had a huge following, but I was unhappy with the level of awareness that the world had about you and I felt that it needed to be considerably more.
Glennon Doyle:
I knew who you were forever. I feel like isn’t everyone just born knowing who Liz Gilbert is?
Abby Wambach:
Yep.
Glennon Doyle:
I remember hiding out at bookstores because that was one of my places to hide when I was a mom of the little ones. I remember walking into a Barnes Noble and there just being just the whole Barnes and Noble was just covered with Eat Pray Love. Then I read Eat Pray Love 12 times.
Glennon Doyle:
There was this one line it was about your divorce. It said you were trying to be all Nelson Mandela about this. You were trying to be all Martin Luther King about this. You were trying not to get a lawyer because you were trying to be peaceful. You were like, “Until I learned that all of those people actually were lawyers.” I just sat and just laughed. Then-
Liz Gilbert:
Then we met in the airport at the luggage claim in a large western state, Idaho?
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, Idaho.
Liz Gilbert:
Was that where it was?
Glennon Doyle:
In Idaho.
Liz Gilbert:
We were both speaking at the same event and I think we jumped into each other’s arms. I think I came up to you and said, “Are you Glennon?” Then we got into the van to go to the hotel and you climbed over six people and three bench seats to climb into the back seat with me, which I thought was very adorable.
Glennon Doyle:
So subtle.
Liz Gilbert:
You were like, “I’m sitting here. We’re going to be friends.”
Glennon Doyle:
Well, I felt like I had to protect you because everyone in the van was being very… Was everyone else in the van was acting on the outside how I was feeling on the inside.
Glennon Doyle:
First of all, the reason why you turned and talked to me is because I was standing next to you, like very, very close to you because I was freaking out because I was standing at an airport luggage thing and Liz Gilbert was standing there. I don’t know. I felt like doesn’t Liz Gilbert take a rocket ship. Why is Liz Gilbert at an airport? It didn’t seem right.
Glennon Doyle:
Then I said, “Hi, I’m Glennon,” or something, which is unusual. Then you said, “I’m Liz.” Then we recognized each other. Then you asked me where I lived and I told you Florida. You said, “Why?” Which was the correct question. I said, “Well, I always wanted to live by the beach, but I got Lyme disease and that just made me just decide to go live by the beach.” I said, “It’s funny how a woman has to almost die to live how she wants.”
Glennon Doyle:
I saw your eyes go and then that was the moment where I was like, “We’re going to be friends now.” I nailed it. I nailed it.
Liz Gilbert:
I made a Facebook post about it the next day. I made a Facebook post about you saying that and said, “Something to consider, why does a woman have to almost die before she will allow herself to live the way she wants to live?”
Glennon Doyle:
Real quick sister-
Liz Gilbert:
My new friend, Glennon Doyle, then Melton.
Glennon Doyle:
Now sister, you will remember me calling you after that post went up from Idaho, right? In full on like, “Oh my God. Oh my God, this is the most amazing thing to ever happen to me.” That was our first meeting.
Liz Gilbert:
Can I tell you guys how I met Abby?
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Liz Gilbert:
I was texting with Glennon one day on a random spring day and she said, “I’ve made this decision that there’s only a few people in the world who I care about and I am just going to focus on my care on them and I don’t give a shit what anybody else thinks of me. I’m not going to try to get validation from anybody else and the only people I care about are you, and sister, and Craig, and the kids, and Abby.”
Liz Gilbert:
I was like, “That’s great. I’m happy to be on this list, but quick question”, parens, “Who’s Abby?” This is a name I had never heard before in all of our conversations. All of a sudden she’s made the greatest hits of all time. These are the only people in the entire world that I care about list.
Liz Gilbert:
I said, “Wow, that’s lovely, but who’s Abby?” You said, “Oh, you know Abby Wambach the captain of the Women’s Olympic National Soccer Team.” I was like, “Well, that’s also really great. What does she have to do with any of this? What does she have to do with literally anything in this conversation?” You were like, “Oh, I just met her two nights ago.” I was like, “Oh great and she’s now on the list of the only people in the world who matter?” That was the first time that I met you Abby.
Abby Wambach:
That’s good.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh my God.
Liz Gilbert:
You came in strong. You came in strong.
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Liz Gilbert:
Went right to the top. It was amazing.
Glennon Doyle:
My sister and you are the only two people that I told about Abby in the very beginning.
Amanda Doyle:
Not just about the list, it was a few days after that.
Glennon Doyle:
That was how I broke the news. That was my very creative way of slipping Abby in.
Glennon Doyle:
Then I called you from your basement sister. I was in your basement. I had just remember talked to you, just told you. Then I called Liz and told her. I was at the point where I thought everybody would say, “This is crazy. You can’t do this. This is some kind of distraction from your life.” Whatever.
Glennon Doyle:
Do you remember that phone call? Do you remember what we talked about? Do you remember what you said? What I said?
Liz Gilbert:
Yeah. I can’t remember your exact words, but it was something along the lines of like, “But this can’t possibly be the love of my life who I just… This can’t be what it feels like it is. That doesn’t make any sense.” I said, “It might be.”
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Liz Gilbert:
“What if it is? What if it is though.” Says Liz Gilbert who wrote the book that launched a million divorces.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Liz Gilbert:
I’m really bad for the institution of marriage. I don’t know. I probably shouldn’t have said that except for that, I don’t know. It felt like well maybe it is. It seems like something really important is happening to you right now.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. That felt like-
Liz Gilbert:
“And by the way, I think I’m in love with my best friend Rayya,” which was the second half of that conversation.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Liz Gilbert:
That might also be why I was more open to it because I was like-
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah because you had ulterior motives.
Liz Gilbert:
I kind of know the feeling.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah. Yeah. Same, same.
Amanda Doyle:
I’ll tell you what, talk about a plot twist. I knew she was going in there to call you. She comes back out and she’s like, “Well, and also.” I was like, “What?”
Glennon Doyle:
I also remember one more thing that you said because I remember the, “What if she is? What if it is?” That was to me like a thousand bells ringing, angel singing, hark whatever hark means it was that.
Glennon Doyle:
You said something else that was really interesting. I think I know that you knew that my marriage was not good enough for Craig, it was not good enough for me. It just wasn’t enough. It wasn’t right. You said, “She could be the love of your life or she could just be an Abby sized hole that you can crawl through and get the hell out of your marriage.”
Glennon Doyle:
An Abby sized hole. Either way. Thank God.
Liz Gilbert:
Sometimes people show up as that. I remember a friend of mine saying that a guy she had an affair with, she said “Really, he was just a big door with the word exit on top of it.” She said, “I didn’t have the skill to figure out how to get out of that marriage any other way. Then through that big door that had a big exit sign over it.”
Liz Gilbert:
She’s like, “Is that an illegitimate way to do things maybe, maybe not the most elegant way, but it did the job which needed to be done, which was to end something that needed to end.” Now Abby’s not an Abby size hole.
Glennon Doyle:
No.
Liz Gilbert:
Nothing about Abby is a vacancy.
Glennon Doyle:
Truth.
Glennon Doyle:
Talk to us about Rayya because it was happening to both of us at the exact same time, and we’ve never talked about this publicly. We got to kind of walk through a lot of this together.
Glennon Doyle:
Can you talk to us about Rayya and what you would’ve told me that day?
Liz Gilbert:
Well, Rayya my story’s similar in some ways to yours and then very different in others, but primarily because Rayya and I had been friends for 13 years and we had been best friends for eight years. Then for the previous three years we had been something that I simply could not find a word for other than to say that this is my person because I wasn’t able to say because of how much I loved my husband. My husband was so very good to me. You guys you knew him and you knew what a good man he was.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Liz Gilbert:
I didn’t want to be a disruptor of a really serene marriage. It was a marriage with a lot of mutual tenderness, and a lot of care, and a lot of serenity. The three of us were best friends. We were all each other’s best friends. We were a little family, the three of us and he loved her and I loved her.
Liz Gilbert:
The thing that I find so remarkable about it is that we were all so careful and respectful of our positions that I was the married straight woman. He was the older, loving, paternal figure, sort of to both of us. She was the single gay woman not really looking for anybody, but looking after herself at that point in her life. Later when we were together, she said to me, that part of the reason that she hadn’t dated for five years was because she was getting everything that she needed emotionally for me. I was getting everything I needed emotionally from her, which was also why my marriage was so serene. We were really looking after each other at the deepest, deepest level.
Liz Gilbert:
She every once in a while somebody would set her up and she’d go on a date and she’d come out to dinner with me and my husband afterwards. I mean, it was all out there. I don’t know why none of us wanted to disturb this beautiful thing that we had, but she would look at him and she’d go, “Why can’t there be another Liz? This person was perfectly nice, but it’s not Liz.” He would say, “Darling, I know it’s terrible, but there’s only one of them.” She’s like, “Could we just share her?”
Liz Gilbert:
Which actually I thought would be a great idea. I was like, “I don’t see any problem with that. That would be amazing,” but she would always say to me like, “Nobody is you know.” I would say, “Yeah, but that’s a little unfair because you can’t compare a person that you just met for dinner over somebody who’s been your friend for 13 years. We earned this level of intimacy very slowly. You’ve got to give people a chance.” I was always coaching her to give people a chance.
Liz Gilbert:
She was the love of my life and there came a point probably two years before she got cancer, where I came to know that at some part in myself and I had to accept that there was absolutely nothing that I was ever going to do about that because of my care and respect for all three of us.
Liz Gilbert:
I remember feeling what I would call a higher power saying, “Yeah, just love her, but there’s a line here that can never be crossed.” There wasn’t a terrible strain in it. It was this deep surrender. All of us knew it, but none of us were suffering because the love was so big. Then she was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic and liver cancer and given six months to live and my world blew up.
Liz Gilbert:
My heart blew up. My head blew up. The bottom fell out of my earth and there was no more possibility I could not let her go to her death. I knew that I would be with her at the moment of her death and I was. I knew that I would be her caretaker all through her death and I was. The image I had in my head of holding her hand while she died without ever having told her what she was to me was so violently offensive to my soul that it felt like a crime against humanity.
Liz Gilbert:
I simply could not allow that. I saw that in my head and I could not allow that to occur. I knew that I would never be okay if I did and that a great wrong would have happened. That a great wrong would’ve happened.
Liz Gilbert:
Rayya was the person I needed the most in the entire world and I was at a point where I didn’t know how to do life without her. I couldn’t imagine how I was possibly going to live, but I knew that if I let her go without telling her that, and without telling my husband that, my marriage would be over anyway. Nothing was ever going to work again unless that truth was spoken.
Liz Gilbert:
You know because I’ve told you, Glennon, this idea that a great truth liberates everyone involved. The truth sets everybody free. That there was a freedom that she found when I spoke that truth and I do believe he did as well because he knew at a certain level that this was the case. There was a freedom in that being spoken instead of just felt. That was oh my gosh almost five years ago.
Glennon Doyle:
Wow.
Liz Gilbert:
Well more than five years ago. Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
You said to me when I was starting to tell people the hard thing, you’d said, “Don’t forget every truth you tell is a kindness even if it makes people uncomfortable and every truth you don’t tell is an unkindness, even if it makes people comfortable.”
Abby Wambach:
So good.
Liz Gilbert:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
I remember you also telling me that you had this vision of yourself when you were deciding what to do, which actually doesn’t even feel like it was a process of deciding. It was just a knowing of you at Rayya’s funeral and no one understanding what your grief would be because no one understanding what Rayya was to you and that was another violation of truth for you that you would not be able to… It was that you needed to be with Rayya and you needed the whole world of Rayya’s life to understand what you were to each other also.
Liz Gilbert:
Yeah, I had this vision of people coming up to me and saying, “We’re so sorry that your friend died.” And not knowing that this was my partner. This was the partner of my life. That she was my everything person. That the level of grief that I would be allowed to express publicly would have to be so tampered by holding that down, that I knew that would make me very sick also. In addition to not receiving the care that I would need from an understanding world about what I had just lost.
Glennon Doyle:
How did it happen then? How did it happen that you knew, you got the news about Rayya’s health and then what? You knew-
Liz Gilbert:
I asked her if she like, liked me.
Glennon Doyle:
You did not.
Glennon Doyle:
You said, “Do you like, like me?” I haven’t heard that since eighth grade, but that is what we used to say.
Glennon Doyle:
Do you like, like me?
Liz Gilbert:
Do you like, like me? Yeah. I haven’t talked too much about that interval because it involves a lot of very painful conversations with my then husband that I’m very protective of. There’s not a lot that I would share with you publicly about that, but before I blew up my whole life, I needed to know and you knew Rayya she was so honest, and blunt, and direct. That was what was so incredible about her.
Liz Gilbert:
Was how the truth lived in her, and spoke through her, and how fearless she could be in the face of the truth. I really didn’t know the answer to that. I was like, “Do you like me that way?” I would not have been surprised. I really didn’t know. I would not have been surprised if she had been like, “No. You’re my best friend. Gross.” Because I’d seen her answer people’s… Everyone had a crush on Rayya. She was so hot.
Liz Gilbert:
I’d seen her directly say things like that to people. Like, “Ew no, I love you, but gross. Get away. No interest whatsoever.” Maybe there was a part of me that sort of hoped that she would say that because it would in a way make it easier. There would be a lot less of upheaval that would have to happen.
Liz Gilbert:
She just closed her eyes and just put her head back and then put her head down and started crying. She said later, she felt like in that question, and she, remember, she had been diagnosed with terminal cancer two weeks earlier. She said, “In that moment,” she said, “I felt like a cage opened in my heart and a thousand white birds flew out.” That was her answer. She said, “I feel like a cage just opened in my heart and a thousand white birds flew out.”
Liz Gilbert:
I said, “Okay. So I need to now go have some conversations.” We didn’t even kiss. It was like, please hold. The amount of respect that I have for this person means that now a bunch of other conversations must happen, which actually were very swift because the awareness was there.
Liz Gilbert:
There’s something about telling the truth that makes things tend to go very quickly. If I had known that a lot earlier in my life, I would’ve had a lot less drama, but this was Rayya’s line. Rayya always said, “The truth has legs. When everything else has blown up, and disintegrated, and all the drama, and chaos, and madness, and lies, and stupidity all falls away. The last thing that’s going to be left standing in the room is the truth.”
Liz Gilbert:
She used to say, “Since we’re going to end up there, babe, we might as well start with it.” Let’s just lay it out. Let’s just put the truth on the table and just begin there because that’s where we’re going to end up.” That’s how we got through that and then very quickly we were together.
Glennon Doyle:
We were together over the commitment ceremony. You all did a commitment ceremony in New York, it was incredible. Then very quickly her health just started to fade. What was that all like? I feel like in the world, in the world, you are a joy, freedom, creativity, doula for people.
Glennon Doyle:
In your personal life, you are many things, but one of the things you are is a grief doula. You are called over and over again to walk people through the hardest times. What was that like for you?
Liz Gilbert:
Well, the first six months we had so much fun that because we were like, “God we’ve wanted to be together.” I mean, it was so fun to have sex for the first time with the love of your life. Who you’ve been in love with for years and never had any intention of having that. There was all of that to discover and-
Glennon Doyle:
Remember how drunk they were? You guys were like drunk on love. We came over to your house once and it was like-
Liz Gilbert:
Oh, heads up, so were you, by the way.
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Abby Wambach:
It was literally like these four people were not even having conversations.
Glennon Doyle:
We weren’t talking to each other.
Liz Gilbert:
None of us had our feet on the ground. We were all just insanely in love and in love with each other’s stories.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Liz Gilbert:
We were so excited. That carried us through and we also did a lot. Rayya had a lot of music that she wanted to still record. I felt like part of my loving service to her was to encourage that and let’s go rent a studio space and let’s get these songs cut because she was a musician. Let’s take a bunch of trips to see people who we love.
Liz Gilbert:
I also had so much admiration for the choice that she made, which was to discontinue medical treatment. No one was on board with that except me honestly because I knew Rayya and I totally got it. She was like, “Look, I don’t want to be a cancer patient and these people are telling me that I can live for months with no treatment or that they can keep me alive for months with constant chemotherapy and radiation, where I will be at Sloan Kettering three weeks out of the month.”
Liz Gilbert:
She was like, “They called that great news when they told me that.” She was like, “No, I’m not fucking doing that.” She’s like, “I’m going to die the way I lived. I’m going to live.” Right up until the end, she didn’t have a particular attachment to a length of time that she wanted to live. She had a very strong attachment to how she wanted to live.
Liz Gilbert:
One thing that I learned about that was how important agency is to people who are sick and dying. It would not matter in the least to me what choices anybody who I loved made about how long they wanted to live. What would matter to me is that the choice was theirs and that they were being supported completely in how they wanted to go out or how they wanted to stay.
Liz Gilbert:
If somebody was like I want to fight till the ends of the earth and go to Switzerland and get the newest treatments. If that’s what she had wanted, then that’s what we would’ve done, but that’s not what she wanted. It was so easy for me to be in support of that.
Liz Gilbert:
We kind of had a ball and we used to feel really guilty because people were full of grief about Rayya dying, but she was like, “How do I tell everybody that this is the happiest time I’ve ever had in my entire life?”
Glennon Doyle:
You guys were at karaoke every night.
Liz Gilbert:
Well, constantly we had so much fun. Then there would be times where all of a sudden it would hit us and one of us would just be face down on the floor sobbing. Like, “This is all going to be gone so very soon.”
Liz Gilbert:
That was also in a weird way beautiful and fully living and all of it. Then she made good on her promise to die the way she lived because as everybody who knows Rayya’s story knows she was a ferocious drug addict for most of her life. From the age of 13 until 33, she lived on the streets. She was a heroin addict. She was a speedball junkie. She was a full on three stays at Rikers Island, homeless in Tomkin Square Park. Lots of prison stays, mental hospitals, institutions, rehabs, she was a ferocious addict.
Liz Gilbert:
Then she put it down and she was clean for 18 years. Then she picked it up at the end, which I actually think was kind of always her plan. When I think about the way she used to talk lovingly about how much she missed… She was clean and sober, but how much she missed drugs. I think her plan was always like, “When it comes close to the end, I’m just going to be like fuck it. I’m doing this again. I’m going to go out like Keith Richards.”
Liz Gilbert:
When the pain got bad and they put her on opioids, two things happened. One is that the opioids stimulated the addiction, as she said they would because she’d been a heroin addict. The other thing was that she went with it and I watched it close up. I watched the decision and the decision that she made was, “I’m going to do this because I can and because there’s no consequences anymore because I’ve just been told at this point I have two months to live. Who cares?”
Liz Gilbert:
She was very open about it and she kind of told everybody she was going to do that. I don’t think anybody really questioned it because we were all like, “Well you’ve raised a strong point.”
Glennon Doyle:
Totally.
Liz Gilbert:
“Who could blame you? Go ahead.” For a while the cocaine helped her actually be awake, and alert, and feel more like herself until the cocaine did as you said, Glennon, when you explained cocaine to me so kindly when I was at my rock bottom with Rayya because here’s what didn’t happen. She didn’t die because she was made out of Teflon. She lived another almost year and she instantly became a ferocious, awful drug addict again.
Liz Gilbert:
Everything I had ever loved about her, all of her attainments for her 18 years of sobriety were gone. She was a nightmare. An absolute nightmare. I remember just emailing you and being like, “This is not the story I thought I was going to be in. I don’t know what possible incentive or threat can I give to this drug addict? Don’t keep doing drugs or you’re going to die. She’s a hospice patient. What do you do? I can’t kick her out. She’s a cancer patient.”
Liz Gilbert:
It was the most up against a corner of hopelessness I had ever been in. You just explained that, “Here’s a primer, Liz, different drugs, do different things to people. Cocaine makes people into assholes. That is what it does. Alcohol makes people sloppy and sometimes violent and this makes people…” And that is what happened. That was the most wrenching thing because I had been prepared emotionally to lose her to death, but I had not been prepared to lose her before she died.
Liz Gilbert:
That has taken me years to unthread and to go through… Including my rage at, “We only had this tiny little window of time and you chose your old girlfriend, cocaine and heroin over me.” Which of course anybody who understands addiction knows no addict ever chose that over somebody. She was in her addiction.
Liz Gilbert:
It was brutal. It was absolutely brutal and it was absolute chaos. It was not the beautiful story that I had written in my head as so much of my life has not been. So much of my life. I script it right down to the final scene and then my dear beloved friend life is like, “Oh no, no, no. Oh, it’s not going to be like that. It’s going to be like this. Now what’s your move?” That’s where we were.
Amanda Doyle:
What was your move?
Glennon Doyle:
What was your move?
Amanda Doyle:
How did you handle?
Liz Gilbert:
My move was that I let her go and I had just enough. I had done just enough work on myself and I loved myself just enough that I was able to find this within.
Liz Gilbert:
Plus, in a weird bizarre way, it was almost as if she had been coaching me for this moment her whole life because I had seen her so many times counsel people who had family members and loved ones who were in active addiction. She would say to them again and again, and again, “There’s nothing you can do. There is nothing you can do for them.”
Liz Gilbert:
I remember asking her once, “Is there anything anyone could’ve done or said that could have gotten you cleaner sooner back in the day?” She said, “The best thing that would’ve ever happened to me would have been for people to have cut me off sooner because as long as I still had even one person left in the world who I could use, I would use them and I had no incentive to put down the drugs. As long as there was one person left in the world who would take my bullshit, one person left in the world who would answer the phone, let me sleep on their couch, give me money, feel sorry for me. As long as there was anybody enabling me, I had no reason to quit.”
Liz Gilbert:
She’s like, “It wasn’t until I burned through every single person, there was not one person left who would take me in or have any mercy on me.” That she had to decide whether she wanted to live or die and that’s when she made the decision herself to go get clean.
Liz Gilbert:
I remember hearing her say to somebody once whose twin sister was in very serious addiction, she said to her, “You don’t have a sister anymore. You have a vampire. You have a vampire in your life. Your sister’s already dead. The vampire took her over. If you think you’re helping your sister, you’re actually just feeding the vampire. Now you have to get rid of your vampire. She’s not allowed in your house. She’s not allowed near your money. She’s not allowed near your stuff. The vampire might die. Your sister’s already dead. The vampire might die and then your sister might come back to life or she might not, but you’re just continuing this thing.”
Liz Gilbert:
I heard her so many times she was such an expert on it. I was like, “Oh.” Also, Rayya had always been my protector, and my defender, and my bodyguard, and she became the most dangerous person in my life when she was in her addiction. She was causing huge amount of danger to my life. She also had this trump card, which was, “I’m dying, so I get to do whatever I want. So nobody can tell me shit.”
Liz Gilbert:
Rayya had an ego, like all addicts. She had an ego that she had tempered through years of recovery, but when it came back up again and she had the free pass of death, she was nothing but ego. It was the ugliest aspect of her, which was that whole rebel thing that I always loved, I’m going to do it my way became like, “I’m going to do it my way, no matter who I take down, no matter how much destruction this causes,” but it was really ugly.
Liz Gilbert:
The day came where I made a decision and I said, “I need you to go do whatever amount and combination of drugs you need to do so I can have five minutes of your actual clear mind. I just need five minutes,” because she was just so whacked out and she was like, “Okay, hang on.” She goes in the bedroom it’s like cocaine, a little bit of Adderall. I don’t even know. She was a chemist.
Liz Gilbert:
She comes out, she’s like, “Okay, what’s up babe? You got me for five minutes.” I said, “If you were here, which you’re not, you would kill somebody who was treating me the way you’re treating me.” I knew that to be true because she was so protective of me.
Liz Gilbert:
“You would literally kill if, if anybody treated me the way you’re treating me right now, but you’re not here to protect me. You have now become my danger. I now have to be you. I now have to be the protector of me that you have always been because you are no longer here to do that job. I’m here to tell you that this is over. This shit is over and if you want to die with a needle in your arm behind a locked door alone, like you almost did in your three overdoses 20 years ago, welcome to it. I will not be there. You’re on your own. How ever you want to die. I’m not making any more plans for your life because every plan that I make to try to save you blow up.”
Liz Gilbert:
Hospice stopped coming to our house because she was such an asshole. I was like, “Who gets kicked out of hospice?”
Amanda Doyle:
When you piss off hospice-
Liz Gilbert:
There was no care. She’s like, “Well, what am I going to do?” I’m like, “Beats me. I guess you’re going to do it your way like the way that you are now doing it. You keep playing the death card and the card of no one understands what it’s like to die and you’re absolutely right about that. I have no idea what you’re going to or what it feels like to die. I have a card that you never thought I would play, which is I’m leaving because I have done way too much work on myself to be in this. I’m not going to be in this. Good luck. I love you. I was expecting to say goodbye to you. I didn’t think it would be like this. You’re the love of my life. You always will be. See ya.”
Liz Gilbert:
That was maybe the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, but the truth is always a relaxing space to be in and that was truthfully what needed to happen in that moment. I also remember Rayya saying to me, before she started using drugs, she said, “I will not rest until I see you standing on your own two feet in every circumstance of your life. In every circumstance of your life.”
Liz Gilbert:
I said to her, “This is me standing on my own two feet and I will not allow my life to be taken down by anybody not even you and not even under these circumstances because that’s not what I’m here for.” She made a call to an old friend in Detroit and said, “I need help,” and went out there and got off the drugs.
Liz Gilbert:
While she was a hospice patient dying of cancer, she got clean. I came back and then I said, “You need to make a plan for what your life is because I can’t plan your life. You tell me what your plan is and if it sounds like sanity to me, I will be part of it, but if it doesn’t sound like sanity I won’t be.” She said, “I want to be out here near my family.”
Liz Gilbert:
I came back out there and then I stayed at her friend Stacy’s house and I helped Stacy take care of her until she died. There was a big humbling for me in that because my grandiosity was I’m the one who can take care of Rayya better than anybody. It turned out I wasn’t as good at it as Stacy who was not just her friend, but her ex.
Liz Gilbert:
I was like, “Okay, so I guess this person’s better at this than me. So I can either be really mad at that or I can be really grateful that somebody has stepped in who’s actually better at managing her and I’m here to help.” I put away all of my big storytelling and every morning I would report to Stacy and say, “How can I be of service to you while you take care of this person who we both love?” That’s how it went.
Abby Wambach:
It’s like when she relapsed into her addiction Liz, it’s like, this was her way of helping you stand on your own two feet. That is the most beautiful thing I can… I just think you are so beautiful and your love is so beautiful because I still think it’s there. I don’t think it goes away in death and my gosh, thank you for sharing that story.
Liz Gilbert:
Thank you for saying that, Abby.
Glennon Doyle:
Did you have moments where you felt her back with you?
Liz Gilbert:
A couple weeks before she died, I mean, she was never the same, but that’s also because she was so weakened by what she had just done. Taking that last ride, which there’s a level which look, Rayya had to do Rayya the way Rayya was. Radical acceptance is letting people be who they are. That kind of Keith Richard’s side of her was very much a part of her and whatever her journey was needed to include that.
Liz Gilbert:
I agree, Abby, I think we both needed to see that not only can I live without you and you don’t need to worry, I can stand on my own two feet. I can even stand up to you, the strongest person I’ve ever known even when you’re trying to manipulate me. I think that she must have felt the power of that.
Liz Gilbert:
We had a conversation that was really incredible two weeks before she died, I was carrying so much anger and so much resentment at what I perceived as having been taken from me. I can step back from it and look at it in a grand spiritual way and see the rightness of all of it and how it had to be precisely that way, but I was really wounded at the way I had been used, and lied to, and all the things that addicts do to people.
Abby Wambach:Liz Gilbert:
Used, robbed, lied to, manipulated, betrayed, it just goes with the territory of an addict and addiction. She didn’t really know what she had done because she wasn’t there. She was in her own addiction story. I said, “I need to talk to you.” What I loved about Rayya and what I learned from Rayya was that incredible fearlessness in the face of the truth. She was one of the few people in the world I’ve ever met who genuinely really did want to know what you were thinking or feeling.
Liz Gilbert:
Other people are like, “I want to know what you’re feeling.” They don’t really. Rayya really did. She didn’t want your fake thing. She would say to me when I was trying to cover something, she’d be like, “Hey, we don’t zip stuff up here. Whatever you’re zipping up here, I don’t care what it is. I don’t care if it’s at me. Can you just unzip it so that we can have it? I don’t want this fake thing.”
Liz Gilbert:
She wouldn’t tolerate it in people, even if it was coming at her. I knew that I could say this even though she was a cancer patient on a couch on her last days. It almost seemed more important to do it because of that. I said, “I need you to know how much pain you caused to me and to other people, but this is really about me.” She went like this. She goes, “What’d I do? All right, let’s go.” That’s how Rayya always took it. It’s like right in the teeth of the Gale, like “What’d I do?”
Liz Gilbert:
I just laid it out. I was like, “You did this, and you did this, and you did this, and you lied here, and you manipulated the fact that I’m innocent about drugs to tell me that you had something under control. Then when I left…” I was like, “This was the worst thing you did, you told all your friends that I dumped you because I couldn’t handle your cancer.” I was like, “That is so fucked up.”
Glennon Doyle:
Of all things.
Liz Gilbert:
I can handle your cancer and by the way, cancer’s a walk in the park compared to addiction. I will completely lay that out right now. I could handle that. I was there for that. I was like, “I will clean up your vomit six times a night, happily. That is not the situation.” I was like, “You still have friends out there who think I abandoned you because of your cancer. You need to make some phone calls and set that straight first of all.”
Liz Gilbert:
I told her all of this and I said, “Then the worst thing that you did was that you stole our time. That we had this tiny little period of time. Everyone only has a tiny little period of time to be with the people that they love and you robbed it and pretended you weren’t doing that.”
Liz Gilbert:
She nodded and listened and then she said, “Yeah. Yeah, that sounds like me.” The love that I felt for her. I’m like, “This is why I love you.” She said-
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, bless her.
Liz Gilbert:
She goes “Yeah. That’s what I’m like.” She literally said, “That tracks.” She’s like, “Yeah, that’s what I’m like when I’m an addict.” She’s like, “I’m a fucking asshole when I’m an addict.” She’s like, “That all sounds really true.”
Liz Gilbert:
She said, “I’m so sorry.” Then she just got quiet for a second and she said, “You know, if this was the real world and we had time and we weren’t running out of road, we would have to do so much work now to get trust back. This would be a thing. We would have to take this on and we would. We would have to go to a lot of counseling. There would have to be a lot of processing.”
Liz Gilbert:
She’s like, “Babe, we’re running out of road and I just have to ask you, will you just forgive me?” I said, “Yeah, I will.” She’s like, “Great. Thank you.” That was a really important conversation and I did.
Liz Gilbert:
I still had stuff to process long after she died, but I did forgive her. I don’t think I would have if I had stayed in the dysfunction. I think I would’ve been so degraded by the dysfunction that I would not have been able to find that forgiveness, but because I was taking care of myself, I was able to do that.
Glennon Doyle:
Liz, my sister would say when I was in my addiction, the worst of it she’d said that she had to withdraw. She had to put up her boundaries so that if I ever came back, there would be something to come back to. So that if I ever came back, we could love each other and that’s kind of what you were able to do because of what you did.
Liz Gilbert:
That’s beautiful, Amanda. How did you know to do that?
Amanda Doyle:
I don’t really know the answer to that, but I did know what you’re saying Rayya knew, about that there is someone else in my sister’s body right now, and it’s not her. I don’t know. I don’t know.
Glennon Doyle:
With that, we’re going to stop right now. I don’t want the pod squad to panic because Liz is going to be back just in a couple days, next episode. I’m going to start the next episode asking Liz about what she misses most about Rayya and how her life has been different after Rayya died?
Glennon Doyle:
I love you, Liz. Thank you for every bit of that.
Liz Gilbert:
I love you guys. I love all of you. Thank you for giving me the chance to tell my story.
Glennon Doyle:
We Can Do Hard Things. We’ll see you back here.