Page 20 of All the Way to the River

In March of that year, Rayya published Harley Loco.

In October, I published The Signature of All Things.

For both of us, these books were proving grounds and personal triumphs.

Rayya’s memoir was evidence to herself, to her family, and to her community that she indeed had the discipline to start, sustain, and complete a creative project that would get her noticed on a global scale, and that she—an immigrant kid who’d scarcely been able to finish high school, who’d been a drug addict for much of her adult life, and for whom English was a third language—could really write .

My novel was evidence to a legion of professional and amateur critics that despite the wild commercial success of Eat Pray Love —a book that had shunted me straight into the chick-lit dungeon of many people’s imaginations—I could still deliver a novel that announced me as an important literary figure.

We’d both worked our asses off on these projects—about four years of labor apiece—and we both received plenty of acclaim for our efforts.

Rayya was compared to Patti Smith and Jim Carroll, called “Huck Finn on heroin,” and praised by Deborah Harry as having written a punk masterpiece that was “true religion.” I reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list, was compared to Victor Hugo, sold the movie rights to the BBC, and made all the “Best Books of the Year” lists.

And we kept working hard once our books were published.

Slinging and banging, hustling and proving.

I traveled all over the globe to promote my novel, and I promoted Rayya’s memoir, too, for which I had written the foreword.

Rayya often came with me when I was touring.

We were interviewed and photographed together quite often that year, because people were becoming interested in our unlikely-seeming friendship: How had the Eat Pray Love lady and this street-smart Syrian ex-con become so close?

“Everything about their pact rails against the natural order,” wrote The Sydney Morning Herald in a cover story about us entitled “Opposites Attract.” “Yet here they are, fourteen years into what has become a very deep friendship; clasping hands, finishing each other’s sentences, Elias absentmindedly fixing Gilbert’s hair. ”

“I know it sounds like a love story,” said Rayya in that article. “And it totally is.”

To which I was quoted replying, “Well, I’d rather go to the laundromat with you than to, like, Prague with anyone else.”

Over time, these interviews began to produce anxiety in me, because I could see that I was revealing far too much of my true heart in them.

My passionate devotion to Rayya—which I thought I was keeping so well hidden—was blazingly obvious in every story.

Also, people kept snapping pictures of me gazing adoringly at my “friend,” and I would cringe whenever I saw the results.

I’d been reading Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall novels during that time.

In them, Thomas Cromwell—the master puppeteer of Henry VIII’s reign—is constantly warning other courtiers: “Arrange your face.” Meaning: Your facial expressions are revealing far too much information about your true feelings, and you are putting yourself in mortal danger.

But I have never been very good at arranging my face.

At a book event in Michigan one night, a woman in the signing line said to us, “You two are such a terrific couple. You should get married!”

“Believe me, I know!” said Rayya. “If Liz wasn’t straight, she’d totally be my wife.”

To which I blurted out, “The reason we’re not together isn’t because I’m straight , for God’s sake! It’s because I’m married . And I’m trying to be good .”

Then I froze, mortified.

To be fair, what I’d said was true: Sexual orientation had no bearing whatsoever upon why I was trying to keep my feelings for Rayya a secret.

I could not care less about the gender of the person I love.

But it was also true that I was trying to be good .

And I believed at the time that being “good” meant staying faithful to my marriage, which was now in its tenth year.

I could not bear the idea of failing at yet another relationship or causing more drama and upheaval in my life and the lives of others.

I’d come so far from my days of romantic chaos (I believed, anyhow), and I never wanted to go through the shame of a relationship blowup again.

And I was proud of my peaceful, caring marriage.

My fidelity was evidence that I was stable, normal, responsible, reliable, and, yes, good .

So I needed to keep a strong boundary between me and Rayya in order to know that I was standing on solid ethical ground here and that I didn’t need to be ashamed of myself anymore.

But apparently I wasn’t doing a very effective job of it—because what kind of conversation was this to be having in a book-signing line, in front of a total stranger?

Arrange your face and shut your mouth , I scolded myself firmly, and then turned to the next person in line, asking, “Who would you like me to make this out to?”

Later that night, alone in my hotel room, I wept with longing for Rayya, but I also wept in fear of what was happening to my life.

I was becoming unmanageable again.

I was losing control.

Arrange your face.

Put it away.

Stuff it down.

Hide, hide, hide.

Keeping secrets is exhausting work—as is book touring—and I was bone-tired during much of that year.

But I was also grateful that I got to be near Rayya, and we really did make a great traveling pair: We shored each other up, made each other laugh, and kept each other safe—each in our own way.

Rayya styled my hair and makeup for all my events and acted as my bodyguard when people tried to get too close.

Ever since the outrageous success of Eat Pray Love , I’d become frightened of getting cornered by volatile, demanding, or otherwise challenging people—but of course, Rayya had no trouble whatsoever dealing with challenging people.

One of Rayya’s first book events took place at a bar on the Lower East Side of New York City, at a group reading called “Voices from the Edge.” I had encouraged her to read from the first chapter of her memoir, which is a harrowing (yet also weirdly and improbably funny) account of a time when Rayya was kidnapped and assaulted during a drug deal gone wrong.

That night, Rayya did not so much read the chapter as perform it, and the audience loved it.

They were breathless, laughing, and amazed by it, and she got a rousing standing ovation.

But after the event, a woman came up to us and chastised us for not having given a trigger warning before the reading.

“What’s a trigger warning?” Rayya asked.

I’d never heard the term, either—not back in 2013.

Frowning in disapproval, the woman said, “It’s a warning you’re supposed to give people before you share sensitive material.

What you read tonight was violent and disturbing.

Somebody in this audience could’ve had a trauma reaction to it, based on their own experiences.

” Turning her attention to me, the woman said, “And you certainly should have known about trigger warnings, Ms. Gilbert, if your friend didn’t. ”

Instantly, I found myself collapsing into a vortex of shame and deep moral failure—which is how I always feel when anyone criticizes me.

Not Rayya.

Before I had a chance to apologize, Rayya backed the woman up against a wall, saying, “Listen, bitch. If you didn’t want to be triggered tonight, maybe you shouldn’t have come to an event at a Lower East Side bar called ‘Voices from the Edge.’”

The woman tried to protest, but Rayya cut her off.

“Did it even happen to you, what I wrote about?” she demanded. “Tell me the truth. Did you ever get abducted by a psychopath? Did you ever get gun-raped?”

“No, but—”

“Yeah, well, here’s the thing about that ‘sensitive material’ you’re talking about: That’s my fucking life .

That shit actually happened to me. This is my story, my book, and it tells the story about my body—and you’re not gonna make me feel ashamed of myself for sharing the truth about my own life.

In fact, if you can’t enjoy the night like everyone else, just get out of here. Nobody wants to hear your bullshit.”

So, yeah, Rayya was a fairly effective bodyguard.

What Rayya wasn’t good at, though, were interviews—which I am very good at.

You could wake me from a deep sleep in the middle of the night, stick a microphone in my face, and tell me I’m live on NPR, and I’d be fine with it.

But Rayya was petrified of being interviewed.

Her biggest fear was to be publicly exposed, in her own words, “as a total fucking idiot.” Always insecure about her lack of education and elocution, she used to tremble in panic before every interview.

I coached her through each encounter, reminding her that she was the foremost expert on the subject of her book— herself .

But people often did ask Rayya questions she didn’t have answers for.

The war in Syria was raging during that time, and interviewers often assumed that she, a native Syrian, would have some special insight about the conflict.

Rayya was the least politically minded person I’ve ever met, however, and she didn’t know a thing about what was going on over there.

So I taught her to say to reporters: “Listen, that’s not my area of expertise.

I left that country when I was a kid and never looked back.

Now if you want to ask me about the Detroit underground punk scene in the 1980s … ”

Rayya was also terrified that her mind would go blank during an interview.

So I taught her, should she ever find herself at a loss as to how to answer a question, to just respond, “Sorry, man. I did a lot of drugs back in the day, and my brain doesn’t always work right.

Give me a minute here to figure out what to say.

” That response always got a laugh and broke the tension.

In the end, she needn’t have worried, because she nailed her interviews the way she nailed everything—by showing up as herself , as this raw and hilarious and vulnerable person whom nobody else could ever be.

The interviewers loved her, the crowds loved her.

And when she and I did an event together at the Sydney Opera House, I encouraged her to close it out by singing the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic, just as her grandmother back in Syria had taught her.

Rayya’s voice, powerful and unaccompanied, filling that legendary hall with ancient words of faith, sounded like a direct channel to the divine. It brought the audience to tears.

And together, we took a bow.

I can see now that Rayya and I were both at our most gleaming that year.

Me, a happily married internationally famous author.

She, a radiant example of the miracles of sobriety.

Both of us out there selling our stories and seeing the world and bringing inspiration to the people.

But both of us were also—each in our own way—fearful and troubled and full of barely contained secrets.

All of which would soon enough be revealed.

Because the truth, after all, has legs.

And when everything else has blown up, the truth will always— always —be left standing, patiently waiting for everyone to acknowledge it at last.