The Eat Pray Love author’s account of her relationship with her late partner Rayya is solipsistic and self-indulgent

The first chapter of Elizabeth Gilbert’s much anticipated new memoir closes on a four-page love letter to Gilbert from her late partner Rayya, who, dead for five years, comes to her in a “visitation”. In Rayya’s voice, Gilbert calls herself babe, baby, or “sunshine baby” multiple times, emotes in all-caps, and grants herself permission to write the details of Rayya’s terrible, humiliating final year. “Let me just look at you for a minute,” “Rayya” says to Liz. “Look at your little rainbow eyes! Look at your sparkling tears! You’re so beautiful!” The letter is deeply self-indulgent and excruciating to read. “You’re going all the fucking way this time – all the way to the enlightenment.”

I believe that the dead are gone and that artists don’t need their permission to evoke them. But I was stunned that this solipsistic mess opens the book, because Gilbert is a terrific storyteller – Eat Pray Love, her memoir of self-acceptance and healing, was read by millions. So, I scrubbed the false start from my mind, reminding myself that great literature shows people as they are, which means that at some point in every good memoir, we should see the narrator being awful.

Continue reading…

To focus on individuals is misguided: the problem is a tax system hugely skewed in favour of the ultra-wealthy

• Sign up for our new weekly newsletter Matters of Opinion, where our columnists and writers will reflect on what they’ve been debating, thinking about, reading and more

It’s been tiresome to see the glee with which Angela Rayner’s been accused of hypocrisy this week, but then anyone who sticks their neck out to call for an end to this engine of wealth inequality gets the same battering. Millionaires who’ve seen first-hand just how completely the system is rigged in their favour, who know how wrong it is and want to change it, get a similar verbal beating on social media and in certain sections of the press. It’s almost as if they protest too much?

Take this week’s political tax stories, one big and one largely ignored. Rayner’s tax behaviour, through lack of proper advice and planning, has created a political nightmare for the government. How could someone on the frontbench of the Labour government have to resign because they didn’t pay enough tax? Also scrutinised, if far less widely reported, have been the tax practices of the leader of Reform UK, who is reported to have channelled some of his earnings into a company to reduce the tax he has to pay on them, having previously criticised people who try to avoid tax as the “common enemy”.

Rebecca Gowland is executive director of Patriotic Millionaires International

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Continue reading…