MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Every week, a guest draws a card from NPR's Wild Card deck and answers a big question about their life. Elizabeth Gilbert's best-selling memoir "Eat Pray Love" inspired millions with its story of self-discovery. Her latest book reveals a much darker side of herself. "All The Way To The River" tells the story of the loss of her late partner, Rayya Elias.
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ELIZABETH GILBERT: Rayya was a heroin and cocaine addict, with a long, long recovery, who picked up her addiction again at the end of her life once she was a terminal cancer patient - for reasons we all understood - and then didn't die in the expected amount of time that was given, and ended up living a year past what anyone expected she would live.
KELLY: The book chronicles Gilbert's own addiction, codependency and enabling behavior at the end of her partner's life. On Wild Card, Gilbert spoke with host Rachel Martin about her addiction recovery and trying to see the good in herself.
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RACHEL MARTIN: What's something you thought about yourself that you had to unlearn?
GILBERT: (Laughter) Oh, I'll share one that I'm still in the process of unlearning. I'm afraid I'm not a good person. I'm afraid that I'm fundamentally a bad person. I'm afraid that there's something fundamentally wrong and dark and bad about me. And it is so deep in the groundwater of my being that I'm - I mean, the words I would use to identify it is fundamentally bad and wrong, that I'm fundamentally bad and wrong. And there's been nothing anybody could ever tell me that would...
MARTIN: Convince you otherwise.
GILBERT: ...Dislodge that. And no amount of meritus action on my part - of giving and loving and sharing and being generous and being kind - could dislodge this, like, deep fundamental fear that I am not good. And I...
MARTIN: Even though you tried. I mean, you write in the book you - your generosity is beyond, but you give with abandon to strangers.
GILBERT: I just want to be good (laughter). I just want to be good. I just want to be a good person. And whatever wounding that I have that I either sort of - that my spirit came in with or that I picked up in trauma from childhood or that I picked up in trauma from culture has indeed caused me to act sometimes in ways that are objectively not good in terms of this is a harm - this is harming another human being. But I actually don't believe that anymore. Like, I don't believe that I'm not a good person. I believe that I am a good person. And that's new.
MARTIN: Oh.
GILBERT: Like, that's, like, been a part of recovery. It's a part of, like, recovering my true nature. So that is a thing I used to believe about myself - that I was bad and wrong - and I don't believe that anymore. And even when I do things that fall short of my own very high expectations for myself, there's a way that I can now speak to myself very lovingly and be like, you are not bad and wrong (laughter). You are not fundamentally bad and wrong. You are a lovely, innocent child of the world who made a mistake, and that's OK. And so it's taken me years to learn how to find that tenderness and compassion toward myself.
KELLY: You can watch that full conversation with Elizabeth Gilbert by searching for Wild Card with Rachel Martin on YouTube. Gilbert's book "All The Way To The River" is out now.
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