Imagine my delight, then, when I cracked open Eat, Pray, Love writer Elizabeth Gilbert’s new memoir. All the Way to the River is an account of Gilbert’s love affair with her ex-addict hairdresser, Rayya Elias, for whom she leaves her husband when said hairdresser is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Here, there is no shortage of tedious psychedelic visions. The pair begin a chaotic, narcotic love affair as Elias huffs all the gear she can at Gilbert’s expense and acquisition, vomiting and partying and quipping her way to death. Elias is a hard-bitten punk/stray pup who spent her youth doped up in the East Village but, by the time Gilbert meets her, has done her time in the “rooms” of 12-step sobriety programs. Gilbert is a fabulously rich and famous writer who gets off on slinging people money, apartments and expensive watches to feed her “love and sex addiction”. The result is 400 pages of feverish prose, poetry and doodling (yes, really) to make sense of what I’m confident in saying must be the most spectacular midlife crisis Manhattan has ever seen.

Gilbert’s memoir has set the press gabbing in a way only comparable to her first moment in the sun nearly 20 years ago, when she published Eat, Pray, Love to memorialize that other time she left a husband in the name of self/sexual/spiritual discovery. The shockwaves prompted by Tuesday’s release must be explained by wonder that these two books are by the same woman at all —  wonder that Gilbert herself shares (“I’m the nice lady who wrote Eat, Pray, Love”). Those of us who recall the 2010 Julia Roberts film adaptation — 133 misty-eyed minutes of snogging and pasta-gobbling and revelation-having — will be glad to know that Gilbert is once again “getting my inner house in order”. Only this time, self-discovery involves fewer Buddhist chants and more of this: “We were holed up in our apartment together with thousands of dollars’ worth of cocaine, much of which she was shooting into her neck and all of which, unbelievably, I was paying for.”

That Gilbert finds herself in such a situation is not so unbelievable when you appreciate the staggering naivete of her writing. After all, this is the archangel of the cult of “healing” we are talking about, a woman forever in search of a therapeutic or spiritual awakening. You sense that Gilbert is the dream client for the sorts of vampires who work in the business of self-discovery: you imagine her welded to a shrink’s chair, or sprawled on a forest floor zonked out on ayahuasca as a headdressed shaman prepares an invoice.

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Reading about Gilbert’s hallucinations, I am back at that party with the drugs bore. During one such trip, she “got to interview Rayya’s cancer cells”. I drain my metaphorical drink. “I loved changing form — turning into animals, trees, air — and watching reality melt.” I look for the exit. “I’ve never once had a ‘bad trip’ on psychedelics; to me, the real world has always felt like the bad trip.” I call an Uber.

For more deep insights into Elizabeth Gilbert’s brain chemistry, you’ll simply have to buy the book. And many, many women will — fans who entered middle age during the boom of therapy culture in the 2010s and, by 2025, have frittered away the autumns of their lives studying the center of their spiritual universes: themselves. For scores of ladies of a certain age, Gilbert has long been a lighthouse directing her readers to alternative futures — wilder, sexier, more delicious. But to read this memoir is to see that quest for enlightenment dashed on the rocks, a spectacular and ridiculous downfall. I wonder what her admirers will make of it.

Gilbert’s life seems to be a series of leaps from revelation to revelation. The book reels from her latest: that she is, like her girlfriend, an addict — “Rayya was addicted to drugs; I am addicted to people.” Now, I am loath to question another woman’s afflictions, but it seems to me that it is rather different to be addicted to crack cocaine than it is to be addicted to kisses and cuddles. Regardless, and despite having seen Elias through her relapse (“I tied off her arms or legs for her while she shot up”), Gilbert is willing to compare them. Intentionally or not, the “addict” label gives her some distinction from boring old “other people” (in other words, the middle-aged Eat, Pray, Love fans whose daredevil experimentation has probably only extended to an extramarital snog and a spliff at someone’s sixtieth). They, she explains, “might experience pleasurable sensations from romance, fantasy, or sex: I get wasted”. From this addiction, she has at the time of writing “been clean and sober for 1,617 days”. She takes us into “the hellscape” of her “addict brain”, explaining that “we addicts” are “artists, liars, lovers, criminals, users, over-givers, over-takers, over-doers… We have created some of the most beautiful things in the world, but we can also do sickening things to people.”

Gilbert not only categorizes herself alongside what us normies might think of as addicts — those who die in alleyways overdosing on fentanyl or steal from their relatives to buy booze — but lets us know that those of us not in this esteemed club are, well, unremarkable. “If you’re reading this and thinking to yourself, Well, that seems quite normal! Everyone needs love, after all!, I can assure you that in my case it is not normal.” It all has the whiff of the child at school who has a cast on their arm and is so incredibly chuffed about it. At every mention of love sobriety I want to grab her by the shoulders and yell: “Well it’s not crack, is it!”

Gilbert’s abstinence, while no doubt brilliant for her “inner child Lizzy”, has unfortunately infected her prose with the emetic language of sobriety meetings. She discusses “emotional anorexia”. She explains how she is also “money sober” to stop impulsive spending. She excuses a man with a pregnant wife who tries to sleep with her as “probably an unrecovered sex and love addict in his own right, and therefore powerless over his own impulses”. Seemingly unable or unwilling to recount events without the sanctimonious verbiage of therapy, Gilbert comes across as brainwashed. It is a shame, because in places she is a good and interesting writer: when Elias dies, she has the look of a “newborn”, “someone who has recently arrived here… the light of another world shining through”. But these moments of originality are dulled by those where she is undeniably self-indulgent: “Other women might pull attention by the way they dress or walk or laugh or play with their hair; I pull attention with my words.”

Reading this memoir, I could not get one image out of my mind. It was of the latter-day Miranda from Sex and the City, that fiery and whipsmart New Yorker who was sacrilegiously rewritten in the bombsite series And Just Like That into a needy, whiny irritant. All the while, she is plagued by the presence of her non-binary partner Che, who fans so disliked as to have put many off watching altogether. In All the Way to the River, there are unfortunate shades of Che. Elias, the “glamor-butch dyke”, no doubt led a fascinating and much-grieved life, but her presence in the memoir — through Gilbert’s eyes, of course — rankles somewhat. She speaks like a JNCO-jeaned teenager from the Nineties (“that shit’s just fresher, yo!”). She has an improbable backstory: she “once lost a six-figure record deal because she told a Sony executive to suck her dick”, which sounds like a yarn someone would spin at the worst afters of your life. She lives rent-free and alone at Gilbert’s New Jersey house for nine years during the period in which they are just friends, hoovering up other material sweeteners along the way. She goes on a global book tour where she sermonizes about sobriety while getting wasted every day on bottles of Angostura bitters (“for her digestion”). She defuses an argument at a funeral by walking up to an aggressive man and tapping him on the chest, saying: “How you doin’ in there, bud?”

But worst of all, she inspires Gilbert to write poetry. The failings of this memoir are most striking in these italicized little verses slotted between chapters. My personal favorite, “The shortest conversation I ever had with God”, goes as follows. “Me: But why? God: Because is.”

Yet Gilbert’s true love affair seems to have been not with Elias, but with the cult of therapy: having finished her book, I now feel I need some too. Despite how exceptionally mixed up this writer says she is, her rip-roaring me-moir is not fascinating because of its private chaos. It fascinates, rather, as a portrait of a generation of middle-class, middle-aged, unhappy women deranged by the mantras of self-discovery. If Eat, Pray, Love was about casting off the shackles of your thirties — rubbish husbands, body-image woes, the dreary rat race — then All the Way to the River catches up with those same women two decades on: all this time searching, and they still don’t have the answers. Gilbert’s first memoir seemed an exhortation to scoff, snog and Om your way to happiness; this radically different one retains its laser focus on the self, how I feel, above all things. But this is no prescription for life, and therapy culture/crunchy yoga mom spirituality has left many a woman untethered, lonely and, well, dull. The problem with shrinks and shamans is that they tend to keep lost people on a lifelong search for meaning instead of turning around and saying, finally, Get it together.

Yet within a few months I realised they were right: I had a favourite garden centre, I had joined the National Trust and, most terrifying of all, I had found myself listening to Steve Wright in the afternoon on Radio 2. That’s not even the end of the story. I loved the show, until Wright played Pulp’s “Common People” and, at the end, mentioned that it was one of the afternoon’s “Oldies”. I switched the radio off and sat in silence for the rest of my journey. Within a year or two, I had given up comedy, moved to Cornwall and taken up wild swimming.

Today, I am tempted to buy that tweet as a non-fungible token — if that wasn’t an extremely silly thing to do — as it changed my life. Perhaps the tweeter would throw in the rest of their thread, in which they expanded on my problematic cisheteronormativity and other middle-aged attitudes. It is striking that the same person who believes that gender can be totally separated from biology will assume without thinking that being middle-aged is biologically predetermined; social constructionists like Margaret Morganroth Gullette thought that we are aged not primarily by biology but by culture.

The opposite was believed by William Osler, Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, who insisted on the “comparative uselessness” of men over 40: “the effective, moving, vitalising work of the world is done between the ages of twenty-five and forty — these fifteen golden years of plenty, in which there is always a balance in the mental bank and credit is still good”. After 40, you are only frittering away the capital; you could look on the midlife crisis, then, as the last attempt to get something in the bank for a rainy day.

Mark Jackson’s “intimate history of the Midlife Crisis”, Broken Dreams, is an attempt to synthesise these two viewpoints. Just as it would be foolish to deny that the drop in hormone levels on hitting middle age has any effect, it would be wrong to suggest that there are no cultural factors in the midlife crisis.

Before the twentieth century, the concept was unknown, partly because there was no middle age to speak of: those born in 1891 could expect to inherit from their parents at the age of 37, but baby boomers had to wait, on average, until they were 56. With people having children younger — or, at least, drawing a line under having children younger — this created a new demographic, sandwiched between the elderly and the youth.

At first, this age seemed full of promise: the best-selling book of 1933 was Life Begins at Forty, in which Walter Pitkin argued that while men “wore out at 40” in previous ages, with modern medicines and mechanisation increasing the active lifespan, “men and women alike turn from the ancient task of making a living to the strange new task of living”.

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But it is just as true to say that “death begins at 40”. As one of the books cited by Professor Jackson, the Ladybird Book of the Midlife Crisis, puts it: “When we are young, we all dream of doing something wonderful and exciting with our lives. What will we be? A cosmonaut? An underwater detective? A tommy gunner? A groin surgeon? Anything is possible. And then, one day, it isn’t.”

Change is — to quote Brideshead Revisited, the best novel about middle age — “the only evidence of life”; and the moment you realise that promise will not be fulfilled is the day that you die. As Jane Pearce and Saul Newton of the Sullivan Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis wrote, “many people die during middle age, although they may wander through the world like zombies waiting to be buried decently for thirty years or more”.  It is no accident that Reginald Iolanthe Perrin carried a briefcase with the initials “RIP”.

The midlife crisis, then, is a choice between Death and Life; it is no wonder it is stressful. The phrase comes from a 1959 lecture by Elliott Jaques, who defined its parameters: “entering the prime of life, the stage of fulfilment, but at the same time the prime and fulfilment are dated. Death lies beyond…” Efforts to remain young — “the hypochondriacal concern over health and appearance, the emergence of sexual promiscuity in order to prove youth and potency, the hollowness and lack of genuine enjoyment of life, and the frequency of religious concern” — are all “attempts at a race against time”.

Although Jaques was a psychoanalyst, this diagnosis was not based on his practice; he only had one case study, a middle-aged man named “Mr N”. In an interview some years afterwards, he admitted that he was Mr N. (Professor Jackson fails to mention this; perhaps it would give rise to the outrageous suggestion that there is an element of narcissism in the midlife crisis.)

This book starts, quite rightly, with the Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Reggie Perrin is stuck in a rut; his children have left home, and he is bored with a pointless job that will take up his time until he retires. So he runs naked into the sea on the beach in Broadchurch, supposedly to commit suicide. The first series ends happily, however, when he returns in disguise as Martin Wellborn, and gets back together with the wife he abandoned. A happy ending, if you are willing to accept Elizabeth Perrin as someone who only exists in relation to her husband. (Where’s her midlife crisis?)

Professor Jackson uses the story of Reggie Perrin to illustrate the factors in the midlife crisis, with one curious omission. This is clearly a spiritual crisis — and I have seen Christian readings of the series as a self-emptying or kenosis as part of a spiritual journey; and other, less convincing readings, which point out that CJ, Perrin’s boss at Sunshine Desserts, is JC (or Jesus Christ) backwards or that Perrin dies and is reborn through water, and so forth.

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David Nobbs, the writer of the novel and the TV series, was a fervent humanist, but even he accepted that there might be something in a Christian reading: “[Reggie] was a man trying to find an individual way through a corporate world. It was implicit that he was without religious faith. He was searching for value, for moral certainty.”

This is puzzling since even Jaques’s original diagnosis of the Midlife Crisis took as its starting point Dante’s Divine Comedy: “Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark / For the straightforward pathway had been lost.” Certainly a spiritual solution would have been of more use to Reggie Perrin than to have his crisis ascribed to his age, class and other demographic factors; it is clear that medical intervention was not going to work. I fully accept that the company doctor at Perrin’s office was not at the cutting edge of medical science, but this is as far as that will take you:

Doc Morrissey: Do you find you can’t finish the crossword like you used to, nasty taste in the mouth in the mornings, can’t stop thinking about sex, can’t start doing anything about sex, wake up with a sweat in the mornings, keep falling asleep during ‘”Play For Today”?

Reginald Perrin: That’s extraordinary, Doc! That’s exactly how I’ve been feeling.

Doc Morrissey: So have I. I wonder what it is?