“That person”, by now, was erratic, abusive and potentially dangerous.
“There was a real, like karmic predicament that I was, that I was in… I’m like, She’s killing me. She now has to die. And as I say in the book, I’m the nice lady who wrote, Eat, Pray, Love, and that’s where I got to.”
This is not hyperbole. Gilbert sat on that park bench and counted out different kinds of pills, and calculated if the stash was enough to knock her out. And she knew the apartment was harbouring enough fentanyl patches to finish the job.
For months, she had been lying to everyone in her life about what was happening in the penthouse.
“I’d been communicating with the world through what were essentially a series of press releases, even with my intimate friends. Being like, yeah, Ray is really brave, and she’s struggling, and she’s amazing, and she’s my hero, and I’m the selfless caregiver, and we’ve got this whole thing under control.
“And nothing could have been further from the truth at that point, when she was spending thousands of dollars a day, a week on cocaine, I was going down to the needle exchange to get needles for her. It was a nightmare. Nothing in my life had ever prepared me for anything like that.”
The reason Elizabeth Gilbert is telling me this story from her home in upstate New York and not from a prison cell is that when she went back to the penthouse that day, Rayya was unusually lucid.