Elizabeth Gilbert had murder on her mind — and seriously considered poisoning the love of her life.
The popular author underwent a radical life change after penning the best-selling “Eat, Pray, Love” two decades ago, about ending her heterosexual marriage and joyfully traveling the world. She ended up with the guy she famously fell in love with during a visit to Bali, but they divorced in 2016.
And Gilbert became obsessively involved in an intimate relationship with her hairdresser, an “ex-junkie, ex-felon, postpunk, glamour-butch dyke” named Rayya.
The relationship is forensically detailed it in her latest memoir, “All the Way to the River” [Riverhead Books], out now.
Describing herself as love addicted, Gilbert writes that their happiness was virtually destroyed when, out of the blue, Rayya was diagnosed with pancreatic and liver cancer, given just six months to live and refused treatment. Instead, the book claims, her response was cocaine, fentanyl and morphine.
So Gilbert begins scoring drugs for her lover on the streets of the Lower East Side.
With that toxic diet, and facing death, Rayya became abusive, Gilbert claims — attacking her for no real reason and refusing to allow her to sleep. To deal with it all, Gilbert herself began self-medicating with a cornucopia of drugs.
Realizing her downward spiral, she decided there was only one way out.
“I came very close to premeditatedly and cold-bloodedly murdering my partner,” Gilbert shockingly reveals.
Describing herself as the “nice lady” who shot to overnight fame in 2006 Gilbert admits that she “fully intended to kill” Rayya by camouflaging her sleeping pills “to look like morphine pills” while both were stoned at their posh East Village penthouse.
“We were high as hell. We were flying,” Gilbert writes. “There was a lot of weed, the best prescription marijuana available in New York at the time. We were both using a lot of Xanax and Ambien, a bunch of psychedelic mushrooms, and MDMA.
“I had far more powerful substances coursing through my bloodstream — Xanax, psilocybin, sedatives, sleeping pills and ecstasy.”
Plus, she writes, “We were sky-high on love drugs from the internal pharmacy: endorphins, oxytocin, adrenaline.”
But the drugs didn’t kill her murderous plan.
Gilbert’s motive for the contemplated homicide was that Rayya “had taken her affection away from me.”
Now 56 and sporting a butch buzz cut, Gilbert is a long way from her glamorous glory days when “Eat, Pray, Love” sold 18 million copies and Time magazine named her one of the world’s most influential people.
That book, published in dozens of languages, sat on The New York Times Best-Seller list for 187 weeks and earned her $10 million in royalties. And the film adaptation starring Julia Roberts and Javier Bardem, was a box-office smash, making Gilbert even richer.
Her latest is already the #1 self-help book on Amazon, with a film option in the works.
Most, but not all, of the reviews have been positive.
Publisher’s Weekly declared: “Readers struggling with addiction or seeking a path through heartbreak will find wisdom in these pages.”
Online, Gilbert fans have given mixed reviews — with one, on Net Galley, writing, “This is raw and messy delving into Rayya’s drug addiction and Gilbert’s sex/relation addiction. I don’t think I needed to know all of this.”
While Gilbert writes that Rayya, who passed away on January 4, 2018, at age 57, had pushed her to tell all — the good and bad about their relationship — some of her family members were not entirely thrilled.
As Gilbert is set to go on a 23-city book tour promoting “All the Way to the River,” Rayya’s sister told the New York Times, “We all knew from Day 1 that a book was going to be written and money was going to be made out of my sister’s death. To me, Rayya should not be on display.”
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