Oprah Winfrey selects Elizabeth Gilbert's new memoir for her book club

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NEW YORK (AP) — Elizabeth Gilbert's “All the Way to the River," a memoir that has already stirred up an online conversation, is Oprah Winfrey’s new book club pick.

In Gilbert's book, published this week, the author writes of a consuming love affair with the self-destructive and terminally ill Rayya Elias, a onetime friend for whom the author left her husband. Gilbert already has an influential and well-chronicled history of transformation and telling all — starting with her million-selling phenomenon, “Eat, Pray, Love," a spiritual journey that ends with Gilbert marrying the man (Jose Nunes) she will divorce to be with Elias.

“With ‘Eat, Pray, Love,’ Elizabeth Gilbert started a movement,” Winfrey, who interviewed Gilbert in 2012 about “Eat, Pray, Love,” said in a statement Tuesday. “This new memoir is just as powerful — raw, unflinching, and deeply healing. She bares her soul, sharing her truth so openly, she offers readers the courage to face their own.”

Winfrey recently interviewed Gilbert at a Starbucks in Seattle; the Starbucks chain is the current presenter of her club. Their conversation can be seen on Winfrey's YouTube channel and other video outlets.

Gilbert's book was well publicized before Winfrey's endorsement. Last week, New York magazine's The Cut ran an excerpt and The New Yorker released a review by staff critic Jia Tolentino that led to widespread comments on social media, notably about Gilbert's confiding that she thought of killing Elias, whose addictions the author feared would destroy them both. (Elias died in 2018.)

“Gilbert frames her journey with Rayya as a sort of test strip for the universe: take a love affair for the ages, dip it in an unbelievable amount of mutual suffering, and see what color everything turns,” Tolentino wrote.

Like dozens of book club choices before her, Gilbert learned of the news through an unexpected call from Winfrey.

“I’d been told by my publisher to expect a phone call at a certain time and date that week, but I thought I was going to be talking to my editor about book business," Gilbert said in a statement. “There is nothing in the world that can prepare you to receive such a call. I instantly felt like a teenager all over again, watching ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show’ after school, and learning that there is a much, much bigger world out there than I knew.”