All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation
The organizing principle and revelation of the book: Gilbert’s journey with Rayya is merely an extreme version of a dynamic that 'all of us' can relate to ... I’m not sure that’s true. I’m also not sure that it needs to be ... Gilbert’s prose in All the Way to the River is often strangely flat and clipped ... The new book reads, at times, like the transcript of a Ted talk ... Much of the book is like this, with one-sentence paragraphs surrounded by white space, somewhat in the manner of an Instagram post ... This time, Gilbert doesn’t gesture toward the idea of moving on, or of being changed.
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Fans of her more lighthearted memoir and novels may be shocked by this book’s intensity, but it’s a brave story with an ultimately hopeful outcome. Anyone who has faced addiction—or loved someone who has—will recognize and be moved by Gilbert’s journey.
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Gilbert takes readers to a darker, more complicated space than many of her earlier works. This is a harrowing, vital, and ultimately transcendent exploration of fierce love, codependency, and grief ... The lessons Gilbert derives from her devastating experience are hard-won and devoid of platitudes. The central liberation she references in the book's subtitle is not a sudden, sun-drenched epiphany, but a slow, painful untangling of self from another in order to love more fully and more honestly.
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