The Flower Bearers
A Memoir
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Jan 20, 2026
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
“This singular memoir stunned me. With a poet’s precision, Rachel Eliza Griffiths renders two interwoven tragedies few others could have lived through, much less written about with such clear-eyed candor.”—Mary Karr, New York Times bestselling author of The Liars’ Club
On September 24, 2021, Rachel Eliza Griffiths married her husband, the novelist Salman Rushdie. On the same day, hundreds of miles 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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
In her luminous memoir, Rachel Eliza Griffiths braids grief and love into a candid account of survival and renewal. On the very same day that Griffiths married author Salman Rushdie, her closest friend, poet Kamilah Aisha Moon, died unexpectedly. Eleven months later, as Griffiths navigated newlywed life and mourning, her husband was attacked and gravely wounded. Interwoven with this present-tense ordeal is the story of a creative sisterhood that shaped Griffiths’ and Moon’s art and courage. Griffiths writes with a poet’s precision and a reporter’s clarity, turning private catastrophe into an intimate portrait that honours both women and the love that sustained them. The structure moves cleanly between timelines, pairing scenes of hospitals and headlines with those of mentorship and creativity, and the story is intimate without ever tipping into melodrama. The Flower Bearers transforms unimaginable loss into testament, celebration, and hard-won hope.
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.
