Elizabeth Gilbert: "All the Way to the River" | Oprah's Book Club

25:26The new memoir is called All the Way to the River. Let's get back to our conversation. So let's get to Rea's cancer diagnosis and what happened after that. So she's diagnosed with cancer. Yeah. So she was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic and liver cancer and given six months to live. By that point, she was firmly established in my consciousness as the most important person in my life. My ground of being, my foundation, I now see I had made her into my higher power. And I've heard addiction described as false worship, right? You make something into your God. You make the alcohol into your God.

25:57You make the drug into your God. I made her into my God. So now I'm losing my God. Like, it's not just that she's dying and my friend is dying. It's like, I won't, the feeling I had was, I will not survive this. This is a world not living in without Rhea in it. I don't know how to take care of myself. She's the one who makes me feel like I'm taken care of. And in the aftermath of that, I finally found a word for what it was that I was feeling for. It's like, oh, I'm in love with this person. And I can't let her, and I still see that there was no other way this was going to go, given who we were and what the realities of our spirits were.

26:33I couldn't let her die without letting her know that you are not just my friend. You are the love of my life. Right. And so you told her. Yeah, I told my husband first. Yes, good. But I told her and very quickly my husband and I separated and I went to be with Rhea. She had moved into your house by that time. I had a couple houses and she was living in one of them. Yes. She was living in the church house. Yeah. Okay. So here's, here's an interesting thing. Cause I thought, you know, so many of us do this, you know, I live by this principle of intention, understanding that whatever you intend is actually going to determine the outcome.

27:11So I love this moment where you've invited her to come to stay at the house and you've invited her for nine months. And then that time is up. You want her to continue to stay. So you offer her the opportunity to write her own book. You make her an offer that she cannot refuse. Yeah. Because who's going to turn down that? And if you stay here, you can just live here. You can just live here for free. Who's going to turn down that? But the real reason you were doing it, your real intention was you had a fear of losing her. Yeah. And that I'm going to hold you to this contract of writing a book. And it's going to look like if you're writing a book, but really it's keeping you in my life.

27:49That's exactly it. I'm too afraid to lose you. And that was when we were just friends. Yes. So she had come out and lived at this church that I had that I was offering to people to use as an artist residency for nine months. And at the end of that nine months, I had realized who she was. And what it did to my nervous system when she walked in to the room was that I calmed down when Rhea was there. I felt this absence of something that I'd felt my whole life, which was this low-grade terror that I've always had of everyone in the room. Because Rhea handled people so well that when she came into the room, I felt deeply safe.

28:22And that sense of safety that I could not provide for myself, that she was able to provide, made me completely dependent on her. And what I did when I said, why don't you stay, was a little something we call manipulation. Yes. And I feel like this is the part of the book where perhaps I most reveal the parts of myself I don't want anybody to know about me. But it was like, I can't live without you. I don't know how to take care of myself. I'm terrified of the world. Your presence makes me feel like the world isn't scary. What am I going to have to do to make sure that you don't leave? And you're not my romantic partner and I'm married, right?

29:00So I was like, oh, I'm going to generously offer you a writing grant just so that you can stay. And this is me pulling the strings of somebody else's life to get what I want, which is what addicts do, right? you lose your integrity and you start manipulating people, places and things to get the drug that you need. Because at that point I was using her as a sedative. Okay. When she starts to drink the bitters or take the bitters and you look the other way and you realize, oh, the bitters are like what? 47 % alcohol. 47 % alcohol. She's not supposed to be taking alcohol or drinking alcohol. And she tells you, comes to you and says, babe, do you mind if I have a glass of wine?

29:51Because other friends of mine have said that I should have some wine. And you say yes. But inside yourself, you know that that's not the right answer. Or do you? I was pretty good at compartmentalizing. You know, I often think, I don't know if you all have this, but like I think there's things that some parts of us don't allow other parts of us to know yet because we can't handle it. So Rhea was an addict in recovery. She had at that point 17 years sober. She was a heroin and drug addict. In the rooms of 12-step recovery, it is an acknowledged truth that there is no difference between substances when it comes to addiction.

30:29And although she was a drug addict, she should not be drinking alcohol because that is also a mind-altering substance. And sobriety is I do not take mind-altering substances, right? So when she suddenly said that she wanted to start drinking, you know, there was like a little part of me that was like, is that a good idea for somebody who like lived on this, like a low bottom addict? Like jails, institutions, like, is that a good idea? You know, but she was also very convincing that it was fine. and the bottom line was, I say in the book, I overlooked it rather than looking it over because I couldn't have there be any flaws with my God.

31:07Yes, because by this time you've made her into a God. Yes. I love what you say early on in the book, page nine. What we commonly call an addict, I believe, is just an exaggerated version of all of us. Just a person so desperately in search of relief from the sting of life that they will use anything or anyone to soothe it. I hope for your own sake that you have never fallen quite as low as Raya and I fell at some points during our journey together. But even if your wills have never fully come off, I suspect at some level that I might be you and that you might be me and that all of us might be Raya.

31:43Can you expand on what an addict is? Just an exaggerated version of all of us. It's extremely uncomfortable being a spirit in human form. Yes. I don't personally believe that we come from this planet. I think we visit here. And I think we make this decision to come to what I call and many people call Earth School. Yeah, I believe that too. And I believe it is the toughest curriculum. It is a highly accredited school. I don't care how privileged you were. You know this, and I know this. There's nobody who moves through the experience of Earth School without trauma. And then there are these magical substances that you can take that ease that pain.

32:22And then there are these amazing people you can meet who seem to be able to ease that pain. There are these activities that you can do that can make you numb out. There's ways that you can escape your curriculum. And I think addiction is what happens when the escape that first, it always feels good at first, right? It's like, okay, here's relief. When the relief becomes a problem. During Raya's last year of life, award-winning filmmaker Mark J. Francis followed Liz and Raya through some extraordinary moments of love, loss, and their search for meaning. I'm just asking for a little grace, a little mercy.

33:09So, please help me.

33:15Okay. I like a chick that likes to keep me drugged up. That's me. Little Miss Cotton Socks. The film titled Here I Am will be released in 2026. For more information, go to www.speakit.org. So how soon after she moved in and you all were together did it start to spiral? I'm pretty good at holding things together, but I would say that I became aware pretty early on that, oh God, it's like, I'm watching my mind go back and forth between denial and realization, denial and realization, denial and realization. I mean, any of you who've ever been in a difficult relationship would also probably find that question hard to answer.

34:08When did you know? Well, you kind of always knew, but then you also kind of never knew. I don't know. Like, it's almost like having a head injury. Like, honestly, you know, it's like, what was I doing? But I will say this, very quickly, she became somebody who I was deeply reliant upon. And very quickly, that reliance started to create anxiety in me. Like, what am I going to do if she goes? Like, what am I going to do if I lose? And was the diagnosis still six months? You're still working on a six-month? Oh, we're talking about right after she was... Yeah. Oh, sorry. So right after she was diagnosed with cancer, very quickly, I left my marriage to go and be with her.

34:49The diagnosis was six months. And we kind of went on a bender together. I mean, there was also, there was the trauma and the drama of you've got six months to live. But there was also, we've been in love with each other for a long time. And we've both been keeping our hands to ourselves and been very good. You know, she had also been in love with me during that time, as it turned out. And so we had all the heady excitement and joy of being newly in love at the same time as the terror and the trauma of death. So it was a very heightened time. Something I've learned a lot about in recovery is addiction to excitement and addiction to drama.

35:31and when you have an unregulated nervous system and you don't know how to soothe yourself, addiction to drama can be a way that you act out. And what I've learned now is that I was always afraid of being bored, so I've always had a very high drama, high octane, high excitement life. But somebody in the rooms explained it to me that excitement and boredom are just two sides of the same coin and that coin is actually called anxiety. Interesting. Yeah. So when serenity is not on the menu, when you don't know how to regulate yourself, when you don't know how to feel well, when you don't know how to be okay and you feel the anxiety that comes with that, you've got two choices.

36:16You can feel restless, irritable and discontent, bored, or you can go override the feeling of anxiety by piling on a whole bunch of excitement, adrenaline addiction, cortisol addiction. Okay. If you grow up with a lot of drama and trauma, your body actually gets used to very high levels of cortisol and adrenaline. And that also feels like home. That's right. So we went on an adrenaline ride. That's why some people just thrive in chaos. Yes. Seemingly. They thrive in chaos. Yes. There was a point in your relationship where you were trapped in hell. Yeah. Right? And you said you could see no way out.

36:52The apartment that you were renting became a dungeon of misery and danger and degradation. This was like in New York City, a two-bedroom. My beautiful apartment I rented for my partner so she would be happy in the last months of her life. And then she started taking all the opioids for the pain, for the cancer. And then that just triggered fully an addiction that I think had been getting triggered for a long time since she'd started drinking. She added cocaine. She added cigarettes. She added trazodone. She added methadone. She added, I mean, suddenly there was like a cocktail of drugs in her and she became a full-on junkie.

37:30Baby, I want to bring a cigarette in here and smoke it. Do it. And she wasn't a very nice one. Her nephew at one point said to me, I wish Auntie Ray was a nicer drug addict. But she wasn't. She was a really mean drug addict. What kinds of things would she say to you? She was abusive. She was abusive and degrading and demanding and entitled. And, you know, I'm a little good little codependent. So, you know, you start abusing me, I'm going to work harder to make you happy. And so we got into that cycle really, really quickly. At one point, you were going to the free clinic for needles? Oh, yeah.

38:02And I got recognized there, Oprah. I went to the free clinic to get needles for my drug addict partner down in Chinatown at a New York City needle exchange. And I walked in and the woman went, oh, my God. And then she remembered it's an anonymous program. You're not supposed to be like, I know you when people come in to get needles for their drug addiction. She hands me a clipboard and I fill it out that I'm a heroin addict. And the whole time she's looking at me like, I love your books. And I'm like, I'm a heroin addict and I need some needles. And she's like, okay. But I didn't want Ray to have to go down there because that would have been shameful for her.

38:37So I'll do it. Like that's how good an enabler I am. I'll do that for you. I will go get your needles. Did you, what did you feel when the woman recognized you and you were there to get three needles? I turned it into a funny story. Actually, it is, I mean, it is objectively a funny story. I mean, she looked at me and she was like, oh my God, Elizabeth. And then she was like, oh my God, I'm so sorry. And then there's no, there's no like playbook for what do you do when you're at a needle exchange getting, you know, and you're like a bestselling author. And like somebody meets their hero and it's you, but you're picking up needles for heroin.

39:07Like there's no, so this is how I handled it. I just went.

39:15What is that? I'm like, what am I even telling her? Like, I'm like a little wink, like a little, hey. I'm like, I don't even know what this means or why I'm doing this. But I'm like, hey, we're just, you know, doing this. Yeah, and I was paying for her cocaine and I was taking, you know, I was giving her whatever she wanted so that she would love me again. Thank you for joining us for Oprah's Book Club presented by Starbucks. Stay with us for some great insights from my conversation with Elizabeth Gilbert. Welcome back to Over's Book Club, presented by Starbucks. Let's get back to the conversation with mega bestselling author Elizabeth Gilbert.

39:53Over 13 million of you read her first memoir, Eat, Pray, Love. Now her vulnerable new memoir, All the Way to the River, Love, Loss, and Liberation, is my latest book club selection. When I got to the chapter title Plotting, weren't you all just like, I thought, whoa, what is going on here? You reached a point where you actually thought about murdering her. Yeah. And also killing yourself or murdering her. Well, first I was going to kill her. And then I realized I couldn't because she was too cunning. She kind of smelled it in the air. And then I was like, oh, oh, I could just again cut out the middleman and I could just kill me.

40:36And that was my rock bottom. Did you read the beginning of this chapter for us? I say in the book, I'm the nice lady who wrote Eat, Pray, Love, and I was going to murder. I was actually going to murder. It was in July of 2017 that I came up with a really good idea for what would save me from the nightmare that I was now trapped in with Rhea. I decided I would kill her.

40:59So how low had it gotten at that point? That's how low it had gotten, you know? and I hadn't slept in weeks. I was absolutely in the lowest of my degradation of codependency enabling, like my life had become sort of Sid and Nancy, you know, just this, I was acting in ways and doing things that I never imagined I could have done, but that wasn't why I was upset. I was upset because she was being mean to me. I was upset because the person who I had created as my God who would take care of me was being abusive and had taken her love for me, which I was now the end game always of codependency, begging her, begging a junkie to give me.

41:39Right? So we were both in - Begging the junkie to give you and to be nice to me. Begging a heroin addict who was shooting cocaine between her toes and into her neck to give me safety, nourishment, and love. This person is going to give me safety, nourishment, and love. Wow. Right? That's where we had gotten to. And there's a moment where, you know, when I tried to kill her and then she kind of figured out I was trying to kill her and she was like, don't you start plotting against me. I mean, she was a street start, smart survival. Nobody was going to kill Raya. Yeah. But there was a divine moment of intervention there where I heard God's voice.

42:14And I was very far from God at that point. When you're deep in addiction, you're very, very far from being able to hear God's voice. But God's voice penetrated that insanity. Tell us what God's voice said. And God said, if you have reached a point in your life, where you are seriously considering killing yourself or somebody else, you have very likely reached the end of your power. That being the case, perhaps you should call somebody and ask for help. And you did. And I did. And I spent the rest of that day sobbing, sitting in a dog park in New York City, calling person after person, anybody who had experience with drug addiction, and just pulling wisdom down.

42:52And what was really interesting was that I was trying to get them to figure out how to help me get Raya off drugs. But what they were saying to me was, you have a problem. Somebody said you need to... It hadn't occurred to you that you had a problem? No. I had a problem. Her name was Raya. I had to fix her. Yeah. You know, but I didn't have a problem. I'm the person who takes care of everybody and fixes them. So what I was being told and what a friend of mine very gently said was, I've watched you now, Liz, for 30 years. Do this. And I think you really need a different kind of help. And there's a program.

43:26There's a 12-step program. for people who have sex and love addiction. And I think you might want to go check it out. So then did you decide that day that you heard the voice from God that I'm going to now go back and tell Raya that I can no longer be a part of this story? Tell us about that moment. I actually ended up leaving and going and staying with a friend for a few weeks because I was so out of my mind. I mean, I was also so sleep-to - I was so far from myself. I was so completely lost. She's been awesome. and she's in such a rage that I just couldn't do it anymore and other people have had to step in and take care of her and just said look I'm living in my sister's apartment 10 minutes away my phone is always on whatever you need is taken care of Chunky's needs are taken care of like I'm still 100 % providing for you in every way whatever you want to do and she was like I don't want to see you.

44:20I started going to 12-step meetings during that time for codependency, for, you know, people who are family, Al-Anon, people who are family members of addicts, sex and love addiction. Like, I started, I got what they call smart feet in the rooms where I started taking myself to a couple meetings a day. Had it occurred to you that you had a sex and love addiction up until this point? I mean, I knew I was a little, I mean, no one's going to look at my relationship history and say that is an emotionally stable person. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know what I mean? Like if I laid it all out and I had - That's why I think the book is going to be so freeing, liberating for so many women who are gonna recognize themselves in your story.

44:59Yes. They're gonna say, oh, I've done that or I do that. I've gone from boyfriend to boyfriend or partner to partner, girlfriend to girlfriend and haven't really assessed it. You're just like looking for the right person. And culture's telling you keep looking. And culture's telling you to keep looking. Right? And all the movies are telling you, like, he's out there, she's out there, you're going to find it, your magical love story, right? So we're being sold this at the same, I don't want to blame culture for myself, but it's also part of it, you know? I mean, if I had been acting out with alcohol and cocaine and heroin the way I acted out in relationships, my friends would have had an intervention for me years ago.

45:36I mean, they kind of did. You know, but I wasn't going to listen to anybody, you know? I mean, people were always saying, do you want to take a break? Do you want to pause before you go into the next? This seems a little sudden. Do you really want to get married? You just met this person. I was like, yes, I'm a passionate person. Yes. And I am a passionate person. But I was abandoning myself again and again and again. And for me, what emotional sobriety looks like is no abandonment of self. That's my definition of emotional sobriety for me. No abandonment of self. And I was constantly abandoning myself.

46:11and undermining myself and selling myself short. What did Raya do when you said, I can no longer be a part of the story? She went back home to Michigan. So the day came where I finally did say, I can't be in this story anymore. It's too degrading. And she, an old friend, helped her to get clean. And she got off all the illegal drugs. Miraculously, she was a hospice patient. She had no motive. I mean, that was part of the reason I couldn't threaten her because how do you threaten a hospice patient? If you keep doing these drugs, you're going to die. She's like, I'm already dying, bitch. I can do whatever I want.

46:41You know, like she had a full past. Like she got a big case of what they call in the rooms, the fuck it's right. She got a big case of the fuck it's. She was like, I can do whatever I want because I'm dying anyway. In six months. And I was sort of like, I can do whatever. The prognosis was six months. How long? A year and a half because she was made out of titanium. And she lived on drugs and alcohol and like ring dings and hot dogs the whole time. It wasn't like she was like doing anything nutritious, you know, but she was really tough. Even pancreatic cancer had a tough time killing Raya. Wow.

47:11She was tough. So she got clean. She got clean. And so we never got back to the intimacy we had had. But I did get to have a sober Raya at the end of her life, and she did die clean. And we were able to have a conversation about what had happened and a little bit of reconciliation. Well, I have to say, you write extensively about your own recovery journey. I really want people to read the book to find out how you did it. It's a long process. Yeah. It's always ongoing, right? Yeah. You're entirely now off of any mood-altering substances. Yeah. Yeah. And for me, of course, that's people. Which means you're still celibate too.

47:53Can I say that? Yeah. And that is not a requirement of recovery in my program. But for me, my higher power, a lot of times when people come into the recovery program I came into, it's suggested that you do 90 days of no contact with anybody you're involved with or a year of celibacy. A year of celibacy in 90 days is nothing for somebody who's been deep in the paint in this addiction for 35 uninterrupted years. I have been abandoning myself into other people from the minute I could, right? I have never given myself a deception of nine months of E-Pray Love when I was on my own. That's the only time in my life I had ever been on my own.

48:29Before I met a man who then showered love on me, I was like, okay, I'll marry you. You know, like, but never had I been on my own, always enmeshed and entangled in one person after another. So for me, I put it down when I came into the rooms. I was like, this is a living amends to all those younger versions of myself who never had the opportunity to know who they were, to learn how to thrive. So for me, this has been the period of my life where I've been in this blooming, you know, like there was a stunted emotional growth. If you're constantly in relationship with other people, you never get to learn how to provide for yourself in a deep emotional and spiritual way.

49:08And that's what my journey has been. What do you want to say to anyone who may be listening or watching us who may be feeling powerless or certainly ashamed? I think, first of all, you read this book, you will not be ashamed anymore. That's right. To admit whatever is going on with you because you have poured out your soul and showed us that there is love for yourself on the other side. Yeah. So what do you want to say to those people who are in a situation right now? Obviously, there are people who are watching us and listening to us who are in an unimaginable situation. Yeah. What do you want to say?

49:40Well, first of all, you aren't alone. And part of the reason that I think I wanted to write a book that was so raw and so honest was it's like, look, I'm the Eat, Pray, Love Lady. And look what I got into. You know what I mean? Like I'm the Epre love lady with 20 years of a spiritual journey behind me, 30 years of therapy behind me, all the resources in the entire world, the admiration of the entire world and look what I got into, right? So it's okay. We all end up at various times in our life, very, very far away from ourselves. It can happen to anybody. So that's the first thing that I would wanna say is you are my sister.

50:18I see you. I see you. I know you. I am you, you know? So come and hang out with me, like if you're feeling ashamed. And the second thing I want to say is that there is a dignity that awaits you when you put all the things that you've been using to not have to feel, when you put those things down and you sit with yourself through the worst feelings of your entire journey and you lay comfort upon yourself and you be with yourself and you say to yourself the words that you always so deeply wished that somebody else would say to you, right? That's what I started doing was writing myself these letters from love, from unconditional love, where I would pour into me what I have always wanted to hear.

51:10I knew what I needed to hear because I've been trying to manipulate people into saying it to me forever. What I want you to say to me, but I started to say it to me, was I will never leave you. That is the primary thing. I will never leave you. I am not going anywhere. I have got you. I am with you. You don't even have to get well, and I will never leave you. I see you. I know everything you've done, and I love you, and I will never leave you. I believe now, I've come to believe that God, what I call God, higher power, the great mystery, gave me this spirit to steward through life, this soul, this being.

51:49And I like to believe that it was given to me because God believed I could take care of it. If God didn't think I could take care of it, they wouldn't have given it to me. Absolutely. They gave me me. And I don't think I'd ever fully taken responsibility for me. And when I was first told in the rooms of recovery that you have to take responsibility for yourself, I was so angry because I've been told that since the day I was born. I want someone else to take responsibility for me. And they were like, okay, go back out there and try that again. Try that again. See how it works. Or you can pick up that child and say, you're mine.

52:22I've got you. And I'm going to walk through the rest of this journey with you. And that's what I'm doing. That's the relationship that I'm in right now. So the reversal of obsession, obsession is that person comes first. I come second. God comes last. That's what love addiction looks like. The healing properties for me is you reverse that. God first, me second, everybody else. Right? That's now the new - Amen to that. Amen to that. And the hair? Well, the hair was, I've been dreaming about doing this for years. I think it's really cool when women have shaved heads. And I was always like, I can't do it.

53:00I'm a public figure. I've got to look a certain way. I've got to be media ready. I have to, and I also, I'm a love addict. I'm trying to get people to love me. So I'm always trying to look pretty. Yeah. Right. And somewhere about three years into being celibate and being on my own, I was like, I just want to do this. Like, I just want to do this. And the final moment of it that made me do it was that I was at an event in New York City, a media event with a lot of people around my age, our age. And I looked around the room and every single one of the men had buzzed hair or they were bald or they were graying short, short, short hair.

53:32they all had natural faces and they were all wearing comfortable clothes. And every single one of the women had some kind of pretty girl hair that I know how much it costs. I can price it out. Like I know how much it costs to get that straight and to get that, because I used to do all that stuff. Colored. Colored, trimmed. They all had very expensive hair. They had very expensive faces. Like I could see what they were doing to their faces and I know because I did all that too. And they were wearing very uncomfortable clothes. And I had this moment of rage where I looked around the room and I'm like, why are men allowed to be comfortable?

54:02Why are men allowed to age naturally? And why are men just allowed to be at ease? And then I was like, well, I could just sit here complaining about unfair beauty standards, or I can just claim that entitlement for myself and just say, I'm not going to wait for the culture to change. I'm going to be as comfortable as a man. And so I just went to CVS and got some clippers and I buzzed my hair. And at that point, the decision I made was like, I'm going to be post-beauty. I don't care. I just don't care. I just want to be comfortable. I want to jump into oceans and lakes and rivers. I want to be free.

54:29because so much of my sobriety, my emotional sobriety, my recovery is about this growing feeling of freedom, like this lack of dependency. I'm like, I just want to celebrate this freedom. I don't even care if it's ugly. And then I shaved off and I was like, I think it looks good. I think it looks good. Like, I like it. You have the head shape for it. You have the head shape for it. Well, every single woman I have met when I talk about my hair says I don't have the head shape for it. Is that true? Do we all have weird shaped heads? or have we all been told that there's, even in this regard, something fundamentally wrong with us, right?

55:05Maybe I do have the head shape. I am just saying, because I also for years didn't do it because I was like, I don't have the right head shape. I don't have the right head shape. And now I can guarantee, I can count down what happens is a woman will say, oh my God, that must be amazing. You look so free. And then I hear five, four, three, two. I don't have the right head shape. I don't have the right head shape for it. And it's like, you have been told that every single part of you is wrong from head to toe. every single part of you. Yes. So let me ask you this. Do you feel cured or those urges still show up if you were to beat somebody?

55:37Oh, how? I'm an addict. Don't get me wrong. You know what I mean? Like I've had, I just for today, let's just stay in 12 step recovery language. Just for today, I'm doing really well. You know, like I have a deep respect for my addiction and the power of it. And that's why I go to a 12-step meeting every single day in various fellowships that I belong to. I sponsor people. That helps me stay sober. I have a sponsor. I turn things over in the rooms that I don't want people to know about me. Like I work a program and I work a very, very disciplined program. But the main thing that I do is that every single morning when I wake up, I open my notebook and I do this thing that's called two-way prayer that the original founders of AA actually said was the most important thing that an addict in recovery can have is a direct communion with the higher power of their understanding.

56:32And they gave a lot of liberal concept to what your understanding is, whatever that needs to be. but I open up my notebook and I write these words, dear God, what would you have me know today? And then I download from my higher power what I need for the day. I like, my life has become, and I know you get this, all I wanna do is be of service. So if I stay well and I stay sober and I don't throw my life into somebody else's life and I communicate with my higher power every day, then I have the opportunity every single day to be of service. And in this morning's two-way prayer, God was like, you're going to go talk to the nice lady.

57:08That's what God calls you. You're going to go talk to the nice lady. Thank you, God. Yeah. God said, you're going to go talk to the nice lady, and I just want you to answer the questions. This isn't about you. This interview isn't for you. It's for whoever is listening. Yes. So whatever questions arise, I want you to tell the truth, and that's how you'll serve me today. I thank you so much. I thank you. I thank you so much. I thank you for this book, All the Way to the River. And I love the way the title was chosen about who's going to be the friend that walks with you all the way to the river and not just to 34th Street, but all the way to the river.

57:46I hope you all have All the Way to the River, friends. It's about love and loss and liberation. And it is your soul on the pages as an act of service to everyone who reads it. Thank you so much. So you did that thing, Elizabeth. Thank you. You did that thing. It's available wherever books are sold. Audience, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. I love you.

58:12Before we go, I want to share a quick thing with all of you readers. I recently published something I'm excited about. It's called The Book Lover's Journal. And here's what's great. Has over 100 prompts, like the first book that made you feel seen and the book that reminded you of what matters most, all designed to enhance your reading experience. It's a great gift for book lovers. and I hear book clubs are using it when they meet, which makes me so happy. I write about some of my favorite books in first sentences and it is available anywhere you buy books. An audience, you're all going home with a copy where you can journal all your favorite quotes.

58:46And I hear you have a giveaway of your own. What is it? So I make these stickers. I design them with my friend Margaret and the designer is a young woman named Michelle Mousley who just graduated from design school. Says you are loved. I make them in thousands and I give them away to everybody I meet. Any human I encounter anywhere, I hand them to them. So I brought one for all of you today. So these will be in your bags as well. I think my part-time job as writer, my full-time job is handing stickers out that say you are loved. You are loved, you are loved. To everybody in the world, because I think that's what we all so desperately need to hear.

59:23Well, thanks to our phenomenal partner, Starbucks, for welcoming us here to Starbucks headquarters today. What better place to enjoy good books, good coffee, and good company? The pairing this month is the pumpkin spice latte. Perfect for fall. Go well, everybody. Thank you so much. Thank you.