A Memoir Forged in Tragedy and Resilience
American poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths has laid bare a decade of profound personal upheaval in her moving first memoir, The Flower Bearers. The book centres on two seismic events: the sudden death of her closest friend and the near-fatal attempted assassination of her husband, the author Salman Rushdie.
Wedding Joy Shattered by Loss
The narrative's emotional core is the devastating loss of Griffiths' best friend, Kamilah Aisha Moon. In 2021, on the eve of Griffiths' wedding to Rushdie, Moon was unexpectedly absent. Despite assurances she would be found, the terrible truth emerged during the wedding reception itself: Moon had died alone at her home in Atlanta. The shock caused Griffiths to collapse, hit her head, and briefly lose consciousness.
This tragedy was not an isolated incident but part of a series of losses that began with the death of Griffiths' mother, her "greatest cheerleader and fiercest critic". Her mother had instilled a powerful sense of independence, teaching her daughter "not to lose myself in the stories of others, especially men".
Love, a Fatwa, and a Knife Attack
Griffiths' life intersected with literary history when she met and fell in love with Salman Rushdie at a gathering in 2017. Their relationship blossomed, but the shadow of the fatwa issued against him in 1989 by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini was ever-present. This threat turned horrifically real in 2022, less than a year after Moon's death, when a stranger attacked Rushdie on stage.
The author sustained near-fatal stab wounds to his neck, chest, hand, and eye. Rushdie would later document this trauma in his own book, Knife. For Griffiths, her friend's death and her husband's attempted murder became "an uncanny Janus coin" spinning in her mind, two faces of violence and loss.
Confronting Inner Demons and Finding Light
The Flower Bearers is unflinchingly honest about Griffiths' internal struggles. She writes expansively about her diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder and a serious suicide attempt in her early twenties. In one harrowing episode from 2013, a call to a suicide hotline resulted in police being dispatched to her Brooklyn apartment. They handcuffed her, an experience that made her feel criminalised for a mental health crisis.
Yet the memoir is also a celebration of deep friendship and joy. Griffiths paints a tender portrait of her bond with Moon, forged in their days as struggling graduate students in New York in the mid-2000s. Their connection, built on poetry, music, and shared experience as Black women, offered a sacred space to be themselves.
In the final chapters, Griffiths journeys through the American South to honour Moon and the writers who inspired them, ultimately learning to accept grief as part of life. She concludes with a powerful reflection on survival: "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 published by John Murray (£22).
