The Flower Bearers - Large Print by Rachel Eliza Griffiths (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In this moving memoir, an acclaimed poet and novelist tells the remarkable story of the year when her life and her future were irrevocably changed, turning an impossibly difficult chapter of her life into a beacon of sisterhood, love, and growth

On September 24, 2021, Rachel Eliza Griffiths married her husband, the novelist Salman Rushdie. On the same day, hundreds of miles of away, Griffiths' closest friend and chosen sister, the poet Kamilah Aisha Moon, who was expected to speak at the wedding, died suddenly. Eleven months later, as Griffiths attempted to piece together her life as a newlywed with heartbreak in one hand and immense love in the other, a brutal attack nearly killed her husband. As trauma compounded trauma, Griffiths realized that in order to survive her grief, she would need to mourn not only her friend, but the woman she had been on her wedding day, a woman who had also died that day.

In the process of rebuilding a self, Griffiths chronicles her friendship with Moon, the seventeen years since their meeting at Sarah Lawrence College. Together, they embraced their literary foremothers--Lucille Clifton, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, to name a few--and fought to embrace themselves as poets, artists, and Black women. Alongside this unbreakable bond, Griffiths weaves the story of her relationship with Rushdie, of the challenges they have faced and the unshakeable devotion that endures.

In The Flower Bearers, Griffiths inscribes the trajectories of two transformational relationships with grace and honesty, chronicling the beauty and pain that comes with opening oneself fully to love.

Review Quotes

"The Flower Bearers is a memoir of duality, of intoxicating love and excruciating loss. Rachel Eliza Griffiths has experienced both in profligate, almost surreal abundance. Here is a poet plying her tools in the service of literature's most vital work: describing life, and how to bear it."--Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Memorial Days

"We enter The Flower Bearers through an attention to hands--beginning with a photograph of the author's hands--that is also an attention to care, to how things, people, lives, are touched, brought into unexpected relation, made, and unmade. Rachel Eliza Griffiths has knitted together, from grief, rage, and love, a remarkable memoir: searching and tender and filled with something like grace."--Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary Notes

"In this astounding memoir, Griffiths offers a death-defying loop of triumphant love across life's infernal torments. This is no mere book but a generational blooming."--Canisia Lubrin, author of The Dyzgraphxst

"A beautiful and immensely powerful book about love, grief, and finding a way to be in a forever-altered world."--Julia Samuel, Sunday Times bestselling author of Grief Works: Stories of Life, Death, and Surviving

About the Author

Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet, visual artist, and novelist. She is a recipient of the Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for a NAACP Image Award. Griffiths is also a recipient of fellowships from many organizations, including Cave Canem Foundation, Kimbilio, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and Yaddo. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Tin House, and other publications. Her debut novel, Promise, was a Kirkus Reviews and Chicago Public Library Best Book of the Year.