Elizabeth Gilbert On Love, Loss, And Liberation

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This is Fresh Air.

I'm Tanya Mosley.

And my guest today is Elizabeth Gilbert.

Her 2006 memoir, Eat, Prey, Love, made her famous for a particular kind of longing for reinvention, turning turning a year of post-divorce travel into a cultural phenomenon with millions of readers, a spin-off industry, and a film starring Julia Roberts.

Her latest book, All the Way to the River, is almost the reverse.

It immerses the reader into caregiving, addiction, grief, and loss, with some critics raising ethical questions about its framing and the choice to write in great detail about her late partner's most private moments.

The book tells the story of Gilbert's relationship with Rhea Elias, first her hairstylist and friend, and later her lover, who died of pancreatic and liver cancer in 2018.

Gilbert writes about leaving her marriage for Rhea, the devotion and the chaos of that love, and her own dangerous impulses, lavishly spending on friends, enabling Rhea's addictions, and in a moment of despair, even plotting to end Rhea's life.

Those confessions make the memoir as intimate as it is shocking.

In addition to Eat, Prey Love, Gilbert is also the author of several works, including The Signature of All Things, City of Girls, and Big Magic.

Elizabeth Gilbert, welcome to Fresh Air.

Thank you so much, Tanya.

I'm very happy to be here with you today.

Well, Elizabeth, this book is not Eat, Prey, Love.

You write with such intimacy about your addictions, about Raya's decline, the choices that you made in caring for her.

And I think a good place to start might be, what led you to put these moments on the page for others to read?

And I'm asking that not only as someone who is often perceived as having life figured out, but also as Raya's partner.

Like, what sense of responsibility did you feel toward her in deciding how to tell this story?

Thanks for asking that.

So, Rhea was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic and liver cancer in 2016.

And at that point, our relationship was that we were best friends, although we had long surpassed emotionally

something that you could even call best friends.

We used to call each other, you know, you're my person.

And

both of us, it turns out, later we would find out were secretly in love with each other and had slowly fallen in love with each other over a decade and a half of friendship.

I was married at that time to somebody who I cared about enormously.

We were all being very careful and respectful of each other and each other's feelings.

But when I discovered that she had six months left to live, it was no longer possible for me to hide or pretend that

this was not the person who I loved dearly and that I had to go and be with her, not as a friend, but as her partner.

And from that moment, I started writing about her.

from that day, from the very day that the terminal cancer diagnosis came in, because

I wanted to, the word that kept coming to mind was download her before I lost her.

But it took me seven years after she died to finally write this version of the book, although I wrote a few other versions of it along the way, because it took me so long after she died to process what indeed had happened and

what my role had been and what had happened and how we

got in such a short time in what turned out to be the 18 months between her diagnosis and her death, how it was that we sort of soared to the highest heights and also collapsed to the lowest depths.

You write about some very harrowing moments, and that's really interesting

when you talk about downloading her from the moment that you received that diagnosis about her cancer.

Just so I'm clear, were you aware that you might be writing a book later?

Was she aware that you might be writing a book later?

Oh yeah, absolutely.

It was, everybody was aware.

Yeah, it was actually, you know, she was sort of mandating it, you know, like she very much, we both very much wanted that.

Did you allow her loved ones to read what you wrote before it was published?

Yes, I sent it to all of them a year ago when it was in manuscript.

And what was their reaction?

So it was a different different reaction for each person.

And I mean, it would be, I suppose it would be too private on their account for me to share what everybody's reactions were, but it ranged from a few of her relatives who just loved it and felt like, as one of her nephews said, I feel like I'm so glad there was a writer living with her.

when she was dying because this is Rhea.

And then

there were some questions, there were some factual questions that were brought up at the time that there was disagreement about in terms of how we remembered it.

And wherever anybody expressed that disagreement about how it was remembered, I took those parts out.

And

yeah, I just said to everybody, let me know if there's anything in here that is unfair or untrue.

made sure that everything in there was as fair and true as I could make it.

And that everybody knew it was happening.

I felt like that was really important.

With six months to live, you all decided we're going to express our love for each other.

And there was this potent,

I don't even know how long it was within that time period where you all were experiencing this new love, this intoxicating love.

But something changed over time.

Her disease progressed.

You started enabling what went on to become a full-fledged drug addiction.

You were procuring and administering drugs.

You were even tying off her arm.

How bad did it get?

Well, it got as bad as what you've just described.

And I don't think that that could have gotten any worse for either one of us.

The simplest way that I can express it is that, you know, Rhea,

who had been a heroin and cocaine addict for

a long portion of her adult life and who had found recovery years earlier and was so very proud of having found recovery when she was faced with the real pain and the real terror of her imminent death.

She went back to that.

She went back to the oldest way that she knew to not feel emotional and physical pain and very quickly escalated into

absolutely harrowing drug addiction.

And I had never known Rhea as a drug addict.

I had known her story because she talked about it a lot.

She was so

open about her addiction and about her recovery.

It was a big part of how she identified herself.

So I didn't know that person who showed up.

And that was so harrowing and disorienting for me.

What was happening to me at the same time was that I was also descending down to the most degraded version of myself.

So if the most degraded version of Rhea was a

low-bottom

opioid and cocaine addict who became very manipulative and abusive and

quite terrifying for me to live with, the lowest version of myself,

what I would call a sort of relapse in my life, is

an enabler who has no boundaries, who will do absolutely anything to be loved, who will

pay for everything, who will

just constantly try to be pleasing,

who will allow herself to be abused.

Both of us sunk pretty low.

That description you give of being an enabler, I mean, you use much stronger language in the book and the description of what you were.

I mean, it's a full-on addiction.

You describe yourself as having a love and sex addiction.

I I actually want to have you read from the book your description of what sex and love addiction looks like for you.

My problem is what's officially called a process addiction as opposed to substance addiction, which was Raya's downfall.

Process addictions are characterized by extreme compulsivity around certain behaviors, gambling, shopping, hoarding, eating, sex, control, obsession, gaming, skin picking, etc.

Put simply, Raya was addicted to drugs, I am addicted to people.

Although I do believe that Raya was a love addict as well.

In fact, many folks in the rooms of recovery surmise that love addiction is at the bottom of all the other addictions.

Our famished yearning for love is the great yawning chasm that we keep trying to fill with other things, with drugs, alcohol, food, money, sex, cigarettes, gambling, gaming, success, perfectionism, workaholism, internet addiction, you name it.

Of all the human desires, the need to feel loved is the most fundamental.

When unmet or perverted at a tender age, that need can warp our brains into making dangerous and even insane decisions for the rest of our lives.

Elizabeth, thank you for reading that.

And

you know, when I read that section of the book, I had also read a lot of your other writing.

I even went back to Eat, Pray, Love, Love, which I want to talk about because I feel like you were leading to this moment that you talk about in this book of really revealing this or understanding for yourself that you had an addiction.

You've used other language to talk about your need and the lengths that you'd go to get that love, to get that fulfillment, to feed your addiction.

You called seduction a heist, scouting targets, breaking into emotional vaults as you describe it.

And that is such precise language.

Can you go into a little more detail of what that addiction looked like with Rhea?

Yeah, I mean I think I can start by just going into more detail about what my behavior patterns have been,

even outside of Rhea.

Because there's a level at which the way that I act in my most self-destructive and self-abandoning and using way doesn't even really have much to do with her.

It's something that I've done before, and it's something that I did again,

you know, after Ray had died.

It's something that I've done for decades.

There's a term that we use, and I do identify as a sex and love addict.

I identify as what I call a blackout codependent,

which is, I get so swept up in somebody that I

actually kind of lose my brains

and wake up, you know, similar to the way that a blackout alcoholic would wake up months later and be like, oh my God, what just happened to my life?

That's something that I've done numerous times with numerous people starting at a very young age.

Also, I think some people might hear this and say, well, isn't that what happens when you fall deeply in love with someone?

They may see that behavior as a normal behavior.

Like, when does it stop being human and really starts becoming a problem?

Like all all addictions, it's a matter of scale.

And

as with many addictions, people are left on the sidelines scratching their heads saying, wait, when did that escalate?

And for me, in my extreme attachment disorder that causes me to use other people

as a drug.

Right, there are people in my life that I've used as a stimulant and there are people in my life that I've used as a sedative,

causes me to dehumanize both myself and them, causes me to act out in ways that puts my life in danger and also can put other people's relationships and families in danger.

Like,

there's things I can't do that other people can do, and I know that now.

And I have to be awake and aware and conscious and respectful of that tendency in me the same way that any addict in recovery has to remain soberly aware.

Not just with Rhea, but throughout your life as you kind of lay out to fill your addiction, you would pay friends' bills, you'd buy homes, you'd bail people out.

And you kind of describe that as a little bit of a, it's not just at the kindness of your heart, you are also bailing people out as a means of manipulation in a way.

How are you thinking about the ethics of that kind of financial caretaking when you're not really doing this out of the kindness of your heart because you need to feed your addiction?

Yeah, it's it's complex.

It's first of all, I also have to acknowledge, you know, what happened to my financial life after Eat Pray Love.

It's like the universe was driving dump trucks into my backyard and dumping cash into my backyard.

You know, like it was, it was, it was shocking.

And I was grateful for it.

And nothing in my entire life or how I had been raised or how I had ever lived had prepared me for how to process process that.

And I'm also a really generous person.

It's messy.

It's murky, right?

But that's a very gray area for me.

And

I have heard this story from people who have sudden wealth that this is a sort of stage of it is like, I don't know how to deal with this.

And I want to help everybody and I love everybody and I'm uncomfortable with having this.

And then, you know, you learn.

And in some of those instances, it was absolutely wonderful what I was able to do.

It was so mutually beautiful and pure.

And then in other cases,

my codependency and my need to fix, manage, and control other people's lives because I can't handle my own showed up and other people's need to want to be taken care of forever showed up and we got ourselves into like deep, messy enmeshment.

It seems like it took you a while to get to this diagnosis.

You know, what's really interesting is you won't find love and sex addictions in a psychiatry textbook, but there is this whole 12-step program around it.

You write about this in the book.

And I'm just wondering first, like, do you see the addiction to drugs and your addiction to people on that same plane?

Or do you see it differently, but having almost like a similar impact in your ability to move through the world?

I can only report on how it moves through my system

and what those compulsions have made me do and what they have cost me and what they have cost other people.

And

at that level,

it sure looks a lot like addiction.

And

if you were to break down my entire relationship history, starting like even before I was actually actively

sexual with boys and men, but when I was obsessed, even as a little child, this was like something in me had latched onto this idea that this was going to be the answer to all my pain.

What really actually happened that was transformative was that a friend of mine who's got years of recovery in a substance abuse 12-step program sat me down as a kind of very gentle intervention when things were happening with Rhea and said, You know, I see all this.

I mean, this is very traumatic, what I was in.

And she said, I've been watching you hurt yourself this in these relationships that you've been in for 25 years.

And

I just see that you keep doing this and you keep getting so harmed.

And there's actually a program for this.

And maybe you want to go check it out.

The answer was actually more like 30 to 40 years that I'd been doing it, but she'd only seen the tail end of it.

And

that was the sort of beginning of my recovery program.

I want to talk to you a little bit about 12-step because

you talk quite a bit about how it's helped provide order for you.

It has also helped you understand through others that you're not alone in your addictions, in the way that you move through the world.

And there are a lot of clichés out there using 12-step in shorthand.

Some of them we know, and it's just in our regular vocabulary when we talk about these things.

As a writer,

how was it for you to find new ways to describe the experience without using some of those clichés?

Oh, that's such an interesting question.

I've never been asked anything like that before.

You know, the cliches of 12-step were,

I guess I'll start by talking about those.

I definitely had a repugnance to them when I first came into the rooms because, you know, I don't love a cliché as a writer.

So...

you know, pithy little things like one day at a time or easy does it, you know, felt sort of

hollow, you know, to me.

I'm humbled now and I don't see it that way.

I see those slogans as having a deep wisdom.

And I also, I do love a description of 12-step as like it's a simple program for complicated people.

You know, I like to think I'm really smart and it's...

it's good for me to sit in a room where it's like, it doesn't matter how smart you are, honey.

Like your life is uncontrollable.

And why don't you, why don't you, a very, an old timer very early on in a recovery meeting gave me this great piece of advice and just said, pick one of those slogans that you're rolling your eyes at and marry it.

And, you know, marry it and you're, and see if it can actually help you.

And the one I picked was one day at a time.

Because I can

spiral out into such

shame thinking about the past.

I can spiral out into such anxiety thinking about the future.

And the only place that I'm really safe is like right here,

you know.

And

so we're just doing Wednesday today.

We're just going to do Wednesday and Wednesday is good.

Our guest today is Elizabeth Gilbert.

Her new book, All the Way to the River, is a memoir about love, loss, addiction, and recovery.

We'll be right back after a short break.

I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air.

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Elizabeth, I want to ask you about something that was very shocking to a lot of folks, including a lot of critics of the book.

You detailed a plot to kill Rhea when she was in the throes of her addiction and all that comes with a person

who's struggling with cancer, who's in extreme pain, who's dying.

And you could have kept that to yourself and no one would have known, but you chose to write about it in the book.

Talk to me a little bit about your choice to actually write about that really hard moment in your relationship and in her decline.

Yeah, that was a kind of collision of both of our rock bottoms.

I was

at the end of myself and she was at the end of herself.

It was a situation that had become kind of the very definition of unmanageable.

Her drug addiction was so devastating and

nightmarish, and she had turned into somebody who was paranoid and abusive and aggressive and who also wasn't sleeping because

cocaine addicts don't sleep and also wasn't allowing me to sleep and also wasn't allowing anyone else to take care of her had pushed away all the other people close in our life had pushed away the hospice people who were taking care of her and who was also in hospice So had access to like limitless drugs through hospice and also

whatever street drugs she was procuring at the same time.

And

I was trying to fix it and control it and manage it.

And I

was breaking and she was breaking.

And there was no possibility of an intervention because how do you have an intervention with a drug addict who's got a terminal cancer diagnosis and is in hospice?

You know what I mean?

Like, would you say like, if you keep doing this, you're going to die?

In a weird way,

that knowledge that she was dying was the permission slip that she had.

And everyone kind of got it.

I even got it.

Like,

why not go on the world's biggest drug bender if you're in pain and you're angry and you're dying?

But it was the most harrowing and dangerous situation I'd ever been in with drug dealers coming in and out of the house day and night,

money hemorrhaging from my ATM.

She was nodding off, smoking in bed, setting things on fire.

And I

was insane.

Like, I was so in my own

disease and in my own horror and also in my own withdrawal from this person who I had idealized as the one person in the world I ever felt completely safe around, who had now become the most dangerous person I'd ever been around.

And I lost my mind.

What stopped you?

She stopped me.

She stopped me.

And a sort of pause insanity.

Yeah.

So to answer your question, I had an idea.

And the idea was like,

I should just kill her.

Like, I should just give her all the, like, give her a handful of sleeping pills and a bunch of fentanyl patches.

And just like, I could see no other way out.

And it felt like

the degree of my insanity

that I can speak to here as to how crazy I was was that it seemed like a really good idea in that in that moment, in that morning.

I was like, that's the best idea I can come up with.

And she smelled it.

You know,

Rhea was an incredible survivor.

She had lived on the streets as a drug user.

She'd lived in jails and prisons and institutions.

She was so,

she was such a survivor.

And I walked in the house like with this idea that I was going to try to figure out a way to kill her.

And she just looked up at me and said, think very carefully about what you're about to do right now.

And I wrote about it because this story doesn't make any sense unless I tell the whole story.

And I was going to be writing, and Raya knew that I was going to be writing the entire truth of this story.

And to withhold anything in order to make myself look better

felt very unethical to me.

And the book is about

the way our addictions and our compulsions fired off of each other to lead us both into insanity.

And

I was not interested once I decided to write this book in my image management because

I was interested in the truth.

And I was interested in showing

what codependency and sex and love addiction can lead a person into.

Even a person who presents as somebody who's got it all together, which is how I was out there in the world presenting.

There's the layer of her drug addiction, but when I was reading it, I was also thinking about the layer of caregiving for someone who is terminally ill and isolated.

It's just the two of you.

I think that anyone who is a caretaker can identify with sometimes when a person is so sick, the worst comes out on the person that's caring for them.

And that can be tremendously difficult.

And it's something that we don't often talk about a lot because

all of the attention is on the person as it should be who's actually dying.

Was there also that layer of caregiving?

Like what made you think you could care for someone who was terminally ill and who had chosen not to seek treatment at first?

Yeah, Tanya, you nailed it.

And I'm grateful that you bring this up because I have had a lot of people say to me in the very short time since this book has been published, like,

I'm caring for my partner who has Alzheimer's, and

I have days where I want to kill both of us.

And

somebody wrote me a note and said, like, I'm not using those words lightly.

I don't mean that.

Like, I'm so frustrated.

I could kill you.

Like, really, you know, like, because I'm so at the end of myself.

And

I remembered an oncologist who we were working with just taking me aside.

at one point and saying, you are on the edge of caregiver collapse.

And caregiver collapse is a real real thing, even if you don't add that you're dealing with a rabid drug addict.

You know, if it were only terminal cancer, you're on the edge of caregiver collapse.

Our guest today is Elizabeth Gilbert.

Her new book, All the Way to the River, is a memoir about love, loss, addiction, and recovery.

We'll be right back after a short break.

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Do you read the criticism or the opinions about your books, and particularly about this one?

Not anymore.

I used to.

I mean, I think we all used to.

You know, there's like this, you get excited and then you get scared and then you want to see what they're saying.

But I think about what John Opdyke said, that reading reviews of books that you have written is like eating a sandwich that might have some broken glass in it.

You know, it might not, but it might.

And with this book, I made a decision and I let my publishers know and I said, listen, I don't even want to see the good stuff.

Like I don't even want to see the praise.

I don't want to see the, I'm not reading any of the articles that I wrote with all respect to you.

And as much as I love fresh air, I won't be listening to this interview.

And that's not even so much because I'm scared of negative things that people say about me because there's been a lot of negative and positive things that people have said about me over the years.

And I can assume that both of those things are out there in the world happening right now.

It's actually like a recovery thing where it's like,

I'm in recovery for love addiction.

I'm in recovery from a lifetime of

looking at other people and looking into them to see if I'm okay.

Right?

Like that's one of the ways that love addiction manifests.

It's like, I will only know that I'm okay if you demonstrate to me that I am, if you tell me that I am, if you assure me that I am.

And that's not where I need to be looking.

I don't need to be looking outside of myself in any way for that.

It's, in fact, not sober of me to do that.

So it's not even so much that I'm protecting my tender, tender feelings.

It's that I'm protecting my emotional sobriety.

Elizabeth, I want to talk a little bit about childhood because we referenced it in some of the markers of those who have love and sex addiction and maybe what they're searching for.

You've written memoirs about travel and marriage and creativity, and now grief and addiction, and you've touched around the corners of your childhood.

How would you describe it?

Carefully.

Very, very carefully.

And respectfully

to

the people who raised me and to the people who I grew up with.

And

I would say that

I generally believe that parents give their children everything they've got, you know, and what they don't have to give, they can't give because they don't have it.

And what they do have, they give.

I want to be careful not to say more than that.

because of the great love and

respect that I have for my my parents and the gratitude that I have for everything that they were able to give me and the empathy that I have for what they were not.

You have spoken a little bit around the edges and given some colorful details.

You grew up in Connecticut.

Your parents you describe as modern pioneers.

You guys were living on the earth, right?

Living from the earth.

You were making goat's milk and you weren't watching television.

You grew up on a farm, essentially, a Christmas tree farm.

Yeah, I grew up with a tremendous ethic of self-reliance from both of my parents.

And what they were trying to do and also what they were trying to model was

this really admirable ethic of frugality and

resourcefulness and self-reliance that I'm so grateful for somebody of my generation to have grown up receiving that because it did give me this sense that I still have

that

you can do stuff, you know?

Like you can do stuff, you can make things, you can try things.

My first reflex is always like, I'm sure I can figure this out, you know?

My first reflex is

always to the most resourceful idea.

And growing up with animals, watching baby goats be born every year, being given responsibility for animals to take care of, even as a kid, I felt that we were doing something on that little farm that was deeper than what I was seeing at my friends' houses.

And my friends' houses were a lot more comfortable.

You know, like it was.

They had all the

time.

They didn't just have TV.

They had heat and running water.

And, and

you all didn't have that.

A lot of times we didn't have a lot of those things, you know, but but

you know, it was fun to go to somebody's house and they had wall-to-wall carpeting and a color television.

You could watch the love boat and eat like amazing processed food, you know.

It was it was incredible.

And yet

I am really glad that we grew all our own food and sewed all our own clothing.

Elizabeth, you know, in respecting you wanting to honor your parents, because I completely understand that as well.

You just said said earlier, though, something that really sticks out to me when you said that you used to obsess over boys in school and stuff like that in order to deal with the pain in your life.

What can you share with us about the pain that you might have faced as a child that really turned your attention towards like fixating on other things to get your mind off of it?

Oh, it's such an honest and good journalistic question, but I can't share anything about it because it involves people who are still alive and people who I care about deeply and people who I regard as just as innocent as me and you and all of us.

Do you think there'll ever come a time where you might be open to writing about it?

Not today, and I'm just staying in Wednesday.

And again, this isn't, you know, there's, this is again out of respect.

Before we began the interview, you asked if there was anything that I wouldn't want to talk about.

And the only thing, I mean, I'm so comfortable exposing my own darkness, and I'm so careful with others.

And the example that I always give is I wrote what's arguably the world's most famous divorce memoir, but what do you know about my first husband after having read that book?

As close to nothing as was humanly possible for me to put in there.

You don't know his name.

You don't know about what our arguments were about.

You don't know what our issues were in our marriage.

You don't know what his work was.

You don't know, like as much as I could shield him from that story I did.

You know, when I think about an addictive personality,

do you think you might also have an addiction to self-reflection and revelation, to that feeling of finally seeing things clearly and starting over?

There's something exciting about that as well.

With addiction, I think the simplest way that I,

and again, I'm not like world's addiction giant expert here.

I'm just somebody who's going through my own experience with this.

But what's helpful for me is

to look at a behavior or an activity or an action and then to backwards engineer it from

this question.

So the famous step one of Alcoholics Anonymous is

came to believe we were powerless over alcohol and that our lives had become unmanageable, right?

So the helpful thing for me is to backwards engineer it by saying, is this making my life unmanageable?

If the answer to that is yes, I'm very likely in an addictive or compulsive spiral.

So

the other way I can backwards engineer this is like, I now have a sort of baseline model for what my life looks like when it's manageable.

And I didn't ever ever really have much example of that in my life because I didn't have much experience with my life being manageable.

But what manageability looks like to me now is like, I don't have a bunch of prescriptions keeping me going right now.

I'm managing my own anxiety without needing a doctor's prescription.

I don't need to find a shaman to take me on an ayahuasca journey because my spiritual life feels manageable and understandable to me.

Last night I slept.

You know, this may seem like a really small thing, but like for somebody with a mind like mine to be able to sleep and not have to take sleeping medication in order to sleep

and then wake up in the morning and I was able to sit in meditation this morning for a half an hour.

I did yoga before I spoke to you.

I went to a meeting, checked in with my sponsor.

You know, all of these sort of somatic clues are clues to me that right this moment, my life is in manageability mode.

So the things that I've been doing in the last years to become well seem to be making my life manageable.

So that doesn't to me signal addiction.

Elizabeth Gilbert, thank you so much.

Thank you, Tanya.

Thank you for such a thoughtful and rich conversation.

I really appreciate your sensitivity.

Thank you.

Elizabeth Gilbert's new memoir is All the Way to the River.

Coming up, critic at large John Powers reviews a new show from the creators of Reservation Dogs.

This is Fresh Air.

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In the new TV series, The Lowdown, Ethan Hawk plays a scruffy, stubborn independent journalist in Tulsa digging into the suspicious death of a powerful man.

The show, streaming on FX and Hulu, comes from Sterling Harjo.

the creative force behind the acclaimed reservation dogs.

Critic-at-large John Powers loved the series, and after watching the first five episodes of The Lowdown, he says, Harjo hasn't lost his gift for creating a world you don't just want to watch, you want to live in.

Jean-Luc Godard once said that there are two kinds of directors.

The first kind knows exactly what they're looking for and always aims the camera right there.

Alfred Hitchcock may be the supreme version of this.

The second kind have wandering eyes that keep searching for unexpected flashes of life.

That perfectly describes Sterling Harjo, the Native American writer and director whose first TV series, Reservation Dogs, was one of the great shows of the new millennium.

Focusing on teenagers from the Muscogee Nation in rural Oklahoma, this groundbreaking series was more circuitous than plotted.

Yet episode after episode made you laugh out loud or broke your heart.

It's never easy to follow up on a triumph, and I was anxious for Harjo when I heard that his new new FX show was a neo-noir story set in present-day Tulsa.

Would his drifty, digressive approach work with a crime story?

The answer is yes.

The Lowdown, as it's titled, uses its murder plot to create a world crackling with humor and sadness and, well, danger.

Ethan Hawke stars as Lee Raybon, a used bookstore owner who moonlights as a muck-raking reporter.

He drives around in a white van that bears the message, you're doing it it wrong.

When a son of a powerful Tulsa family supposedly dies by suicide, Lee smells a rat and begins investigating.

He's barely begun when he finds himself targeted by neo-Nazis he's called out in print, threatened by the dead man's brother Donald, a gubernatorial candidate played with slippery ease by Kyle McLaughlin, and tailed by a mystery man named Marty.

That's nifty Keith David, the voice of a million documentaries.

Along the way, Lee gets involved with a cornucopia of other characters.

The dead man's wife, a gossipy antiques dealer, hard-partying cops, caviar counterfeiters, yes, you heard that correctly, and the sardonic publisher of a local black newspaper who says of Lee, there's nothing worse than a white man who cares.

Meanwhile, Lee's ex-wife is about to get remarried, and he's desperate to stay close to his teenage daughter Frances, warmly played by Ryan Kira Armstrong, who finds her loner dad both absurd and admirable.

Both qualities are on display in this early scene, when Lee meets some local big shots at their club.

After sniffing a decanter of expensive hooch, he makes a joke about his line of work and is interrupted by a businessman, played by Tracy Letz.

Yeah, I should have gone in the investment firm business, huh, instead of rare books.

But you are a journalist, too, though, right?

Or some kind of writer?

I'm a truth storian.

Sorry, say it again?

I am a Tulsa truth storian.

A truth storian?

What exactly is a truth storian?

I'm glad you ask.

I read stuff.

I research stuff.

I drive around and I find stuff.

And then I write about stuff.

Some people care, some people don't.

I'm chronically unemployed, always broke, but let's just say that I am obsessed with the truth.

Now, Harjo is steeped in American pop culture, from the Jim Thompson paperbacks that become a plot point to his pointed use of Oklahoma musicians like Leon Russell and Chet Baker.

And surely he knows his Cohen brothers.

Watching the lowdown, I kept thinking of Fargo, with its desolate open spaces, oddball humor, and crazy quilt of tones.

Yet there's more than a whiff of the big Lebowski here, too.

Occasionally fuddled and perpetually disheveled, Hawkes's Lee could almost be the smart, idealistic brother of Jeff Bridges, the dude.

While Hawkes' full-throttled performance carries the show, my he's gotten good, Harjo knows how to keep the other characters surprising.

When we first see the dead man's widow, a role nailed by Gene Triplehorn, we think her cold-hearted and scheming.

But during a night drinking with Lee, we discover she's something far more complicated.

When Peter Dinkledge turns up as Lee's great frenemy Wendell, their day-long encounter begins begins with the two swapping barbs, but then eases into a moving portrait of failure and disillusionment.

Because Harjo is something of a truth storian himself, the lowdown isn't shy about pointing out the pain at the heart of Tulsa's history, most notoriously its 1921 race massacre.

Indeed, Lee's bedroom wall is papered with articles about local historical cruelties.

Yet Harjo is no hater.

He's blessed with a sense of tenderness toward his characters and toward the multicultural Tulsa where he makes his home.

He shoots this unglamorous city with knowing affection, from its junky shops and Lee's local diner, Sweet Emily's, to the deserted nighttime streets where, as Lee's headlights approach, you can see a cat skitter across the road.

We sense that Harjo's view of Tulsa is akin to Lee's.

There's bad things about it, but underneath it's really good.

One might say the same of this series, which occasionally meanders or misfires, but whose every episode is bracingly alive.

A genuinely life-affirming artist, Harjo turns Lee Raybon's Tulsa into an unexpectedly marvelous place.

The Lowdown isn't merely a good show, it's also a really good hang.

John Powers reviewed the new TV series The Lowdown on FX and streaming on Hulu.

Tomorrow on Fresh Air, we'll talk with Sameene Nosrat, the author of Salt, Fat, Acid Heat.

Her new book, Good Things, is filled with recipes, which is surprising since she's long said she hates them.

We'll hear how she came to terms with recipes and why she now sees them as a way to bring joy to the kitchen.

I hope you can join us.

To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPRFreshAir.

Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller.

Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham.

Our managing producer is Sam Brigger.

Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Crinzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nakundi, and Anna Bauman.

Our digital media producer is Molly C.

V.

Nesper.

Our consulting visual producer is Hope Wilson.

Roberta Shurock directs the show.

With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley.

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