The Flower Bearers
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
'A beautiful and immensely powerful book about love, grief and finding a way to be in a forever altered world' Julia Samuel
'The Flower Bearers goes to some dark places, but there is joy, too . . . simultaneously a love story, a portrait of sisterhood and a visceral depiction of violence, loss and emotional devastation' Guardian
On September 24, 2021, Rachel Eliza Griffiths married her husband, the novelist Salman Rushdie. On the same day, hundreds of miles away, her closest friend, Kamilah Aisha Moon, who was expected to speak at the wedding, died suddenly. Eleven months later, as Rachel Eliza was learning to exist without her, a brutal attack nearly killed her husband. As trauma compounded trauma, Rachel Eliza realized that to survive her heartbreak, she would need to mourn not only her friend, but the woman she had been on her wedding day.
And so Rachel Eliza chronicles her seventeen years of friendship with Aisha. From the moment they met in a college library, she knew she had found a soul sister. Their life together was filled with music: they danced to records in their apartments and skipped from one sticky jazz bar to another. Sitting side-by-side at poetry circles, reading Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, marching through Harlem protesting lost Black lives, Rachel Eliza drew inspiration and strength from her friend. Together they learnt to embrace themselves, as writers, artists, and Black women.
Rachel Eliza interweaves this love story with another, that of her relationship with Rushdie, of the challenges they have faced and the depth of their connection. Celebrating the ways that these two extraordinary people have transformed her life, she reflects on the beauty and pain that come with opening oneself fully to love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her stunning debut memoir, poet and novelist Griffiths (Promise) details the most challenging period of her life, during which her best friend died and her husband, the author Salman Rushdie, was brutally attacked. In sumptuous prose, Griffiths recounts her friendship with the poet Kamilah Aisha Moon, whom she met when both were graduate students at Sarah Lawrence College in the early 2000s, and her romance with Rushdie, which ignited after they crossed paths at a literary festival in 2017. On the day of Griffiths and Rushdie's 2021 wedding, Moon failed to show. Griffiths then learned that Moon had died suddenly in Atlanta the same morning. "This was the kind of grief that answered before your name was called," Griffiths writes. "The kind of grief that left you nameless and skinless." She spent the subsequent months mourning Moon and cataloging other traumas, from the death of her mother years earlier to the horrors wrought by the Covid pandemic. Eleven months later, Rushdie was near-fatally stabbed during a speech in Chautaqua, N.Y. With grace and soft humor, Griffiths charts a path through devastation: poetic, heartbreaking, and life-affirming, this grief-streaked self-portrait makes a major impression.
