“So I did what Rayya has taught me to do: I just started there,” Gilbert wrote. Since that’s where you’re gonna end up anyway, you might as well just start there.” When everything else in the room has blown up or dissolved away, the only thing left standing will always be the truth. Here is her mantra on truth … : “The truth has legs it always stands. Last year, in the Facebook post publicizing their partnership and Elias’s diagnosis, Gilbert wrote what she learned from Rayya: Gilbert’s announcement of their relationship on Facebook acknowledged the end of her nine-year marriage to José Nunes, who appeared in the “love” part of her bestselling memoir. I will always love you.Ī post shared by Elizabeth Gilbert on at 6:57pm PST I would tell you to rest in peace, but I know that you always found peace boring. It has been the greatest honor of my life. Thank you for letting me walk with you right to the edge of the river. She was my love, my heart, my best friend, my teacher, my rebel, my angel, my protector, my challenger, my partner, my muse, my wizard, my surprise, my gift, my comet, my liberator, my rock star, my completely impossible non-cooperator, my otherworldly visitor, my spiritual portal, and my baby. “She had this nasty little ’fro,” Elias told The New York Times Magazine. She and Gilbert met in 2000 when Elias was working as a part-time hairdresser in an East Village walk-up.

from fleeing Syria at age 7 with her family to Detroit, to arriving on New York City’s music scene in the punk era. In it, Elias detailed four decades of her life as a gay Middle Eastern woman in the U.S. A Syrian-born writer, musician, and filmmaker, Elias’s own book (titled Harley Loco: A Memoir of Hard Living, Hair, and Post-Punk, From the Middle East to the Lower East Side) was published in 2013 with an introduction by Gilbert. On Thursday, Gilbert announced Elias’s death on Instagram and Twitter.Įlias was 57. “And I have no more time for denying that truth.” They were friends for 15 years and partners for over a year. “I do not merely love Rayya I am in love with Rayya,” Gilbert wrote last year.

The incurable diagnosis brought them together. Eat Pray Love author Elizabeth Gilbert fell in love with her best friend, Rayya Elias, when Elias learned she had pancreatic and liver cancer.

Liz gilbert and rayya