The day 'that nice Eat, Pray, Love lady' plotted to kill her lover.

Elizabeth Gilbert sat on a park bench in the middle of New York City and began to plan a murder.

Not a fictional death to place in one of her million-selling books. Not a figurative one, a slaying of some sort of dragons from her past.

No, Gilbert was plotting an actual crime. On that day, in the Summer of 2017, she knew, with certainty, that she had to kill her lover. Her best friend, her person, her closest darling. Liz Gilbert needed to murder Rayya Elias because their life together had become unbearable.

And the other thing was: Rayya was already dying.

Listen to the full interview with Elizabeth Gilbert on No Filter. Post continues below.

If you're familiar with Elizabeth Gilbert's story, with the remarkable life that has unfurled since she became a household name, played by Julia Roberts in the movie version of her culture-shifting memoir Eat, Pray, Love, you may already know that Gilbert left her second husband for the musician and filmmaker Elias, and that Rayya had been diagnosed with terminal liver cancer.

You may already know because it was all documented on social media at the time. This was 2016, after all, and writers and speakers of Gilbert's calibre (there really aren't many of those, but some of her peers might include Glennon Doyle, Brene Brown…) were still sharing chapters of their personal lives on Instagram and Facebook.

The two women had been inseparable for over a decade, travelling around the world together promoting Gilbert's novels and Rayya's films and memoir. But they were just "best friends", then. Gilbert was cosily married to the man she met in Bali at the end of Eat Pray Love.

But then came Rayya's diagnosis, and Gilbert's immediate realisation that she didn't just love her friend Raya, she was in love with her friend Rayya. They had to be together, and they had to ride out the final act of Elias's extraordinary life as lovers, as partners, as who they perhaps should have always been to each other.

Many people who have followed and admired Gilbert's work are familiar with this story. They know that Rayya died in 2018, and that Liz was by her side.

Watch: Elizabeth Gilbert talks about grief. Post continues after video.

But until Gilbert wrote and published her new memoir, All The Way To The River, they had no idea how dark it got. How murderously dark.

"What was happening during that time was that Rayya, who had been… we call it in the [recovery] room, a low bottom junkie… for a lot of her adult life, living on the streets, living in jails and institutions," Gilbert told me in our interview for the No Filter podcast.

"And she was clean from that for a really long time, and then at the end of her cancer journey, she picked it back up again, and went back into just this harrowing level of cocaine and opioid addiction."

Liz and Rayya were living in a New York penthouse. Gilbert had rented it for Rayya, to be a sanctuary in the middle of the city she loved, but it became "hell".

"It happened so fast. It really made my head spin, because that was the one thing nobody saw coming. I was prepared to be Rayya's caregiver as she died of cancer, but I wasn't prepared to be living with a ravenous vampiric junkie like that, and I had never known her as that person."

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"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.

Elizabeth Gilbert pictured with her new book All The Way To The River. Image: Supplied.

"When I returned to the apartment, my mood was strangely buoyant. I walked in cheerfully, saying, 'Hi, honey! I'm back!' Gilbert writes in All The Way To The River.

"Rayya looked up at me from her seat by the coffee table – which was, as always, covered with cocaine and pills and booze.

"Without even blinking, and in a voice that was dead calm and sober, she said, 'Don't you start plotting against me now, Liz.' For a long, long time, we held each other's gazes in silence. In that moment, it felt as if there were a break in the universe."

And so Liz turned around, went back downstairs, across the road to the park, sat back on the park bench and this time, she started calling friends.

"Instead of murdering her, what I ended up doing that day was beginning to tell the truth, was calling a bunch of friends and really letting myself be seen and revealing what was actually going on in our apartment."

It was the beginning of everything changing again for Gilbert. When one of those friends gently suggested that perhaps she had a role to play in the chaos of this now toxic, high-drama relationship, something began to click into place.

Why is Liz Gilbert — rich and influential and beloved to readers and to a whole community on her substack, Letters From Love — telling us this deeply private story, one that unpicks the neat bow many had placed on her and Rayya's tragic love story?

It's because Liz Gilbert is coming clean about her own addiction—to love, and sex. An addiction that, she says, has almost killed her.

Order All The Way To The River, here.

Feature Image: @elizabeth_gilber_writer Instagram.