Dear Reader,

It’s the season for tell-alls.

First, the haunting mother-daughter story in Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy.

And now comes All The Way to the River, a memoir by Elizabeth Gilbert, bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love. Her latest memoir has the ingredients of a blockbuster - addiction to drink, drugs, love and sex, and an explosive same sex relationship between Gilbert and Rayya, her hairdresser-turned- friend-turned-lover.

Rayya is diagnosed with terminal cancer and relapses into drug addiction, driving Gilbert so crazy that she tells us about her serious intention to murder Rayya. Talk about candid confessions.

As I read these books and discuss them with friends and book clubbers, one question keeps coming up - is it okay to tell other people's stories?

The answer appears in the pages of a book. It is fiction once........

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