Elizabeth Gilbert: I left my husband for a woman. Here's how I'm coping after her death

Elizabeth Gilbert was deep in mourning following the death of her partner, fellow author Rayya Elias, when a feeling suddenly hit her. “I just had an unbelievably strong impulse to shave my head,” she says.

“It’s not an unusual response to major life upheaval. If you go to India, its temples are filled with women with shaved heads who are going through grief. It’s a very primal thing to want to do.”

Consequently, Gilbert went to the bathroom, picked up Elias’s clippers, and… 

“Just as I looked in the mirror, I heard Rayya’s voice, saying: “Baby, no. Put the clippers down. You can keep your hair short, but go find a nice salon. You’re not going to be happy that you did this.’” Even in the afterlife, laughs Gilbert, “she had lost none of her authority”.

It has been just three months since Gilbert lost the woman she refers to as “the love of my life”, and while the pain is still undeniably raw, she manages to find pockets of humour in the situation. “Anybody who’s lost somebody knows that these are the conversations you continue to have with them after they’ve gone. I could clearly hear her say: ‘You will not be shaving your head. Not on my watch!’”

Gilbert, now 48, had been enjoying a reasonably successful writing career when her 2006 memoir, Eat Pray Love, catapulted her to worldwide fame. Detailing the American author’s personal odyssey from depression following a failed marriage to spiritual enlightenment, it saw Gilbert take the mother of all road trips, heading first to Italy where she scoffed pizza (Eat), then moved onto an Indian ashram (Pray), before finding her future husband, José Nunes, in Indonesia (Love).

The book sold more than 12 million copies worldwide, striking a chord with women who, in her own words, “didn’t get the memo that they are in charge of their own lives”. When the couple eventually married, in 2007, it provided a fitting coda to Gilbert’s phenomenal publishing achievement. Until two years ago, that is, when she made the shock announcement that she and Nunes had split, adding a couple of months later that the reason why was that she had fallen in love with her female best friend. In a life that had already been replete with surprise twists and turns, this one was a genuine humdinger.

Was it a shock to Gilbert to suddenly find herself in love with a woman? “Well, I’m not quite ready to speak to that level of intimacy,” she admits, “but, yes it was, and also no it wasn’t.

"I mean, I don’t even know what happened yet and I’m still dealing with the most recent aftermath of that comet [with Elias’s death]. But when we first met, I just delighted in her and found her to be extraordinary, though I was in no way the only person who had that reaction to her; everybody did. I definitely didn’t say: ‘There’s the love of my life who’s going to flip my whole heart and world upside down.’ That took another 12 years.”

Elias, like Gilbert, had had an eventful life. Syrian-born, she had moved to the United States with her family aged eight, and after spiralling into drug-addiction, homelessness and a stint in jail, she finally cleaned up her life, achieving success as a writer, songwriter, short film-maker – and hairdresser.

She and Gilbert met around 2000 and, perhaps fittingly, given Gilbert’s recent near-brush with a pair of clippers, their first encounter came during what Gilbert calls “a hair intervention”. “My friends had told me I needed to do something about my look, so they sent me to Rayya. When she first saw me, she said what she ended up saying for years afterwards whenever she saw my hair: ‘Dude, no…’”

The women fast became friends, Elias acting as confidante to Gilbert during the break-up of her first marriage to human rights activist Michael Cooper, and even accompanying her, in 2010, to the British film premiere of Eat Pray Love (where Gilbert was memorably portrayed by Julia Roberts). For her part, Gilbert actively encouraged Elias to pen her own memoir, the critically acclaimed Harley Loco.

However, two years ago, when Elias was diagnosed with incurable pancreatic and liver cancer, Gilbert was forced to realise the depth of her feelings, posting on Facebook: “Death – or the prospect of death – has a way of clearing away everything that is not real”, adding: “The thought of someday sitting in a hospital room with her, holding her hand and watching her slide away, without ever having let her (or myself!) know the extent of my true feelings for her... well, that thought was unthinkable.”

They became a couple, holding a commitment ceremony last June in front of close friends and family. Gilbert looked after Elias during her final months, and she eventually passed away in January, aged 57.

In death, as in life, Elias was a force. “She went through something absolutely terrifying and brutal,” says Gilbert, “and towards the end, sometimes she was funny, sometimes stoic and sometimes she was shattered and very small. Rayya was everything at once, just as she always was.”

Gilbert, understandably, is still reeling from the loss of her partner. “The grief hits you at weird times, and there are weird triggers for it,” she says. “And it doesn’t matter how expected it was, or even how welcome it was by the end, because of the pain [Elias went through], there’s still the great existential crisis. Where did she go? How is she not here? My favourite person has gone: now what?” she says, softly. 

“I think I understood a lot more about death before I went through this. I had it all figured out… and then it happens, and you’re not prepared for it at all. I guess it’s similar to people who have kids: you think you know a lot beforehand, until you actually have them.

“People have been so kind and generous to me, but when you’ve lost somebody of that significance, the question is: who are you going to be now? And it’s too soon for me to tell.”

Part of the answer, as it has always been for Gilbert, is to write her way into clarity. While she admits “it’s way too soon to be writing about Rayya”, she has been “writing steadily” to deal with her grief, and has an August deadline to finish her next novel, about showgirls and promiscuity in the New York theatre world of the 1940s].

“I’ve been so happy to have that deadline,” she says. “It has put secure walls around me at a time when it’s been good to have them. After such a long period of time of being a 24-hour a day caregiver, nurse, mediator and therapist – things that I’m not quite as qualified to do – it’s been a reminder that this is my vocation.”

As passionate as she is about her own writing, she is just as evangelical about the rest of us unleashing our inner creative powers. To that end, she will be heading to London next month to host a talk and workshop about living a more creatively fulfilling life.

“I was so lucky,” says Gilbert. “My parents told me in a million different ways while I was growing up that my life was mine and that I could do anything I wanted. So it breaks my heart seeing people stuck and believing that tomorrow will be exactly the same as today. If you’re anything like me, your mind is a battlefield of rival voices – there’s a voice in my head that tells me before I even open my eyes in the morning: ‘We’re not exercising today.’ My workshop will help acknowledge those voices, and the parts of ourselves that are afraid or angry, and move forward from that.”

Gilbert once described Eat Pray Love as “a huge screen upon which millions of people projected their most intense emotions”, so given the book’s ending where she and José ride off into the sunset, did she worry about letting her readers down with the eventual break-up of their marriage?

“Oh,” she says, sadly, “I had so many reasons for wanting that story to have a happy ending, and not one of them had to do with my ‘brand’ or my fans’ expectations.”

Will she ever marry again? “God, I hope not! If you see me doing it, just call me up and say: ‘Liz, please think long and hard about this…’”

Unless, that is, Elias gets to Gilbert first: “Rayya was so bossy in life,” she grins. “And she remains bossy even now.”

Elizabeth Gilbert’s UK workshop, Big Magic, will be held at Friends House (173-177 Euston Road, London NW1) on Saturday May 19, 2018. To book, go to alternatives.org.uk/event/big- magic-may-workshop