Elizabeth Gilbert: 'Let Love In'

There was a moment in 2016 when a trapdoor opened in the bottom of Elizabeth Gilbert’s heart and she felt as though her entire existence was falling through the hole.

She had just received a phone call and learnt that her best friend, Rayya Elias, was dying. “As soon as that phone call came, my entire life changed, almost instantly,” Liz says. “I left my marriage. I came to be with her in a romantic way. Some things were made very clear as soon as I knew I was going to lose her. It was the most obvious thing I had ever experienced in my life.”

Liz “blew up” her life and went to Rayya’s side. She dropped the novel she had spent the past few months researching and ended her marriage. She wrote a lengthy explanation to her readers and followers on social media. “Death – or the prospect of death – has a way of clearing away everything that is not real, and in that space of stark and utter realness, I was faced with this truth: I do not merely love Rayya; I am in love with Rayya,” she wrote.

“Literally every single bit of my life had to dramatically change in order to honestly be able to express what she was to me, and to be with her for whatever time we had left,” the softly-spoken American writer, now 49, tells The Australian Women’s Weekly.

Followers of Liz’s work who looked back on her career would have noticed that, as Liz underwent a metamorphosis from being a New York journalist and critically-acclaimed mid-list author to the global best-selling phenomenon she is today, Rayya had always been there.

In 2010, when the film adaptation of Eat Pray Love premiered in New York, Rayya was there. A moment captured before the red carpet shows Liz with her blond hair swept up and her arms wrapped tightly around her friend. The one-shouldered, pink and white Oscar de la Renta gown Liz is draped in accentuates her long neck. Nestled in this swan-like embrace is Rayya, with her pixie haircut, smiling proudly in the orange polo shirt she had worn to do Liz’s hair and make-up for the event.