Elias moved to New York City to become a musician and kept herself afloat with an uncommon talent for cutting hair. Bullied in school and caught between the world of her traditional family and her tough American classmates, she rebelled early. Elizabeth Gilbert When she was seven, Rayya Elias and her family fled the political conflict in their native Syria, settling in Detroit. It is my honor to introduce these pagesso gravelly, so straggly, so hopeful, bright, and true. Eventually, Elias's passionate affairs with lovers of both sexes went awry, her (more than) occasional drug use turned to addiction, and she found herself living on the streets between her visits to jail.

At the height of the punk movement, life on the Lower East Side was full of adventure, creative inspiration, and temptation. When she was seven, Rayya Elias and her family fled the political conflict in their native Syria, settling in Detroit. Finally she did, and the results are searing and amazing. I've known Rayya for years and I've been begging her forever to tell her story. It's a wild true tale of migration, Detroit, drugs, hair-cutting, the Lower East Side, jail, sex and the post-punk music and art scene in the 1980s and 1990s. The book I loved was Harley Loco by (full disclosure) my dear friend Rayya Elias. Harley Loco: A Memoir of Hard Living, Hair, and Post-Punk, from the Middle East to the Lower East Side She is best known for her 2006 memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, which as of December 2010 has spent 199 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list, and was also made into a film by the same name in 2010. Gilbert is an American author, essayist, short story writer, biographer, novelist and memoirist. I hate to say it, but I know the names of all the celebrities’ babies.'Įlizabeth M. Meanwhile, my (very) guilty pleasure is tabloid journalism. But if the first chapter of a novel doesn’t feel perfect and accurate to me, I simply can’t read on it’s too painful. With nonfiction, I figure I can glean something educational or interesting out of the book even if the writing is weak. 'Are you a fiction or a nonfiction person? What’s your favorite literary genre? Any guilty pleasures?' I enjoy both, although I unfairly hold fiction to a far higher standard. If I could read while I was driving, showering, socializing or sleeping, I would do it. 'When and where do you like to read?' When I am awake, and wherever I happen to be.

Liz gilbert rayya elias