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.

Even so, it takes discipline and restraint not to let one’s flaws harm the writing – restraint that it appears Gilbert no longer has. All through the book, she reminds us of Eat Pray Love’s success and tries to echo and relive what she learned back then: that she’s addicted to love, but she can thrive alone if she has her spiritual and creative practices. “Just as in the second part of a verse bad poets seek a thought to fit their rhyme,” wrote Nietzsche, “so in the second half of their lives people tend to become more anxious about finding actions, positions, relationships that fit those of their earlier lives.” Gilbert keeps straining for that rhyme, trying to recapture an earlier magic: this can’t just be a book about Rayya’s drug relapse in her final year, or a meditation on end-of-life choices. It has to be about how Liz ended up on the bathroom floor again (remember that scene?) and divorced another guy (remember that?) because she’s a love addict who craves love and passion more than the rest of us.

Rayya Elias was Gilbert’s best friend before she became her lover, a romance that begins only after Rayya is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Prior to that they’re both married (Liz to the man she meets in Eat Pray Love). When Rayya divorces, Gilbert offers her an isolated house, away from her sobriety group. When Rayya itches to drink again, Liz enables it. Once Rayya is diagnosed and given a six-month prognosis, Liz confesses her love, a dangerous thing to offer a dying addict. “Let’s just live balls to the wall until I die,” Rayya says, turning down chemo for cocaine, which Liz pays for. All this Liz thinks of as “my most beautiful story”.

Which brings me to the poems. Gilbert includes a good number. They are maudlin and trite, with titles such as “God Pauses now and asks me to stay” and lines that read like juvenilia: “The dilemmas, trials, disappointments. / Angel. / My Little one. / You’ve been so tireless in your search for escape.” She strings together self-help cliches with no invention, no curiosity about poetry, or anything, really, but herself.

Physicist Richard Feynman once said, when asked if an ordinary person could imagine the universe as he does, that “there [are] no miracle people”, no magic beyond “practice and reading and learning and study”. Gilbert’s entire oeuvre tilts at the belief that she is a miracle person, her unrefined output magic. If ever she glances outward, she does so only to learn more about herself.

The prose is clunky (“an unhealed wound looking for someone to land on”) and full of preposterous flourishes, such as when an imagined Rayya says, in a poem at the end of the book: “I love it when you talk about me: it polishes me like a diamond.” It’s also deeply uncomfortable when Gilbert claims to have been a conduit for Rayya’s late mother in Rayya’s final days. “My soul left my body so Georgette could be alone with her girl.” Trusting the voice inside your head can be spiritual and powerful, as long as you understand that it isn’t a divine voice, or someone else’s, but your own, subject to your own limitations and desires.

In contrast, Gilbert is at her best when she writes with self-awareness. There is a scene in which she collapses in rage, revealing all of herself, all her ugliness, listing everything Rayya owes her. She confesses to registering herself as an addict to get clean needles for Rayya, and to planning to murder her (“Rayya did not want to die. But I wanted her to die.”) and to being jealous of the ex-girlfriend who finally gets Rayya clean. “My precious, precious reputation as the best person in the world was very much at stake here, and there are very few things that will make me hate someone more than when they threaten my favourite delusions about myself.”

As a storyteller she shines brightest when she’s not curating, but displaying her mistakes, and mourning them. “I tried to drain all the love from Rayya into me before she died … I became a vampire”. And when, instead of simply emoting, she sits down to craft a scene, she writes transportingly. The last days of Rayya’s life, in a house with two of her exes, are funny, propulsive, raw and moving – Gilbert forgetting about herself to help her partner, who’s alone and helpless and terrified to die.