In a deeply moving new memoir, acclaimed American poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths lays bare a decade of profound personal tragedy, weaving together the threads of devastating loss, a shocking act of violence, and the enduring power of love and friendship.
A Decade of Upheaval: From Personal Loss to Public Attack
The series of seismic events began with the death of Griffiths' mother, her fiercest critic and greatest champion. Her mother's lessons in fierce independence became a cornerstone of her identity. In 2017, her life took an unexpected turn when she met and fell in love with author Salman Rushdie at a literary event, an encounter memorably marked by Rushdie walking into a glass door.
Yet a far deeper sorrow was to come. On the eve of her wedding to Rushdie in 2021, Griffiths grew anxious about her best friend and "chosen sister," poet Kamilah Aisha Moon, who was missing. During her wedding reception, she received the crushing news that Moon had died alone at her home in Atlanta. The shock caused Griffiths to collapse, hitting her head and blacking out.
Less than a year later, violence struck with terrifying proximity. In August 2022, a stranger attempted to assassinate Salman Rushdie at a public event, stabbing the author, who had lived under a fatwa since 1989, in the neck, chest, hand, and eye, inflicting near-fatal wounds Rushdie would later detail in his book 'Knife'.
The Flower Bearers: A Memoir of Sisterhood and Survival
Griffiths' first memoir, The Flower Bearers, published by John Murray, processes these twin horrors. She describes the death of her friend and the attack on her husband as "an uncanny Janus coin that [spun] around on the silent, bloodstained earth of my mind." The book is a genre-blending work: a love story, a portrait of Black sisterhood, and a visceral account of violence and grief.
The memoir also delves courageously into Griffiths' private struggles with mental health. She writes expansively about her diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder and recounts a traumatic 2013 incident where, after calling a suicide hotline, police were dispatched to her Brooklyn flat. They forced entry, handcuffed her, and treated her mental health crisis as a criminal act, an experience that left deep scars.
Finding Light in the Darkness
Amid the darkness, The Flower Bearers radiates with the joy of Griffiths' friendship with Kamilah Aisha Moon. The two met as struggling graduate students in New York in the mid-2000s, bonding over poetry, music, and their shared experience as Black women. Their connection provided a sanctuary to share their pasts and dreams.
In the final chapters, Griffiths embarks on a pilgrimage to the American South to honour Moon and the writers who inspired them, seeking a path through overwhelming grief. Her journey leads her to a hard-won acceptance: "I know that life demands deaths, and births, each day. But it also insists on singing, dancing, suffering, surviving and loving."
The Flower Bearers by Rachel Eliza Griffiths is out now, priced £22. It stands as a testament to the resilience of the human spirit in the face of unimaginable loss and a public tragedy that shook the literary world.
