"Eat Pray Love" author Elizabeth Gilbert: "I left my husband for my sick girlfriend?
Gilbert broke up - from the man in the book
Six years ago, Elizabeth Gilbert's autobiography Eat Pray Love? World famous when the book was filmed with Julia Roberts in the lead role. In the book Gilbert describes how she meets her future husband Jose Nunes after a crisis in meaning. She left him a few months ago. The reason: the love for her best friend Rayya. In a Facebook post Gilbert describes her deep feelings for her.
"Love everyone," she writes under the heading ? ME & RAYYA ?,? There is something I want to tell you today? something that I hope and believe that you will graciously accept.
In the spring, I received news that would change my life forever. My best friend Rayya Elias was diagnosed with pancreatic and liver cancer? a disease for which there is no cure. [...] From that moment on, everything was about YOU. I finished everything in my life, which I could finish, and went straight to her side, where I am until today.
Then Gilbert describes in touching words, how much Rayya has meant friendship in her fifteen years. But until the terrible diagnosis, she denied her true feelings for the friend.
"I do not have time to deny the truth?
"Something happened in my heart and mind in the days and weeks after Rayya's diagnosis. The death ? or the prospect of death? clean up anything that is not real, and in this space of extreme and utter truthfulness, I've been confronted with this truth: I do not just like Rayya; I'm in love with Rayya. And I have no time to deny this truth.?
Then she admits that Rayya was the reason why her marriage with Jose Nunes broke in the summer. He is the man from the book - a happy ending with expiration date.
?So. So here we are: Rayya and I are together. I love her and she loves me. I go with her through this cancer journey, not just as her friend, but as her partner. I am right where I need to be the only place I can be.?
Finally, the best-selling author explains why she's going public with her love right now: because she's a well-known personality, and she wants to be able to show herself in the arms with Rayya. In the face of death there is no time for hide and seek.
