Here is what actually happens in the new book, called “All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation.” Gilbert, newly flush with seemingly unlimited cash, and filled with both a desire to be useful and the existential unease of someone who has just won the lottery, begins covering her friends’ therapy bills and tuition payments, and lavishing jewelry, weddings, and houses (plural) on them. At one point, after the 2008 financial crisis, she walks down a street in New Jersey asking small-business owners if they need money. Then her friend Rayya—a hot queer hairdresser whom Gilbert met during her first marriage—hits a rough patch, and Gilbert moves her out of a Chelsea apartment and into a New Jersey church that she bought sight unseen from Laos. (Gilbert had intended it to be a home for herself and her second husband, whom she met during her “Eat, Pray, Love” year.) Gilbert falls in love with Rayya, though she doesn’t admit this to Rayya or to her husband. Instead, she proposes that Rayya write a memoir in lieu of paying rent, and asks her to travel with her, ostensibly so that Rayya can do her hair and makeup for professional appearances. By 2013, Gilbert is admitting to a stranger in a book-signing line that the only reason she and Rayya aren’t a couple is that Gilbert is married and “trying to be good.” Rayya, who is an alcoholic and a heroin addict in recovery, has begun openly drinking again.journey-inline-newsletterinline-newsletter