The Flower Bearers: a ‘visceral depiction of violence, loss and emotional destruction’

Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s memoir opens in 2021, on the day of her wedding to Salman Rushdie. “I am marrying a man that some people have deemed dangerous,” she writes. “What harm could find us on such a day?” One might assume that these “overt intimations of tragedy” refer to the attack on Rushdie 11 months later, in which he was stabbed 15 times and lost sight in his right eye, said Stephanie Merritt in The Observer. But “in fact, her account of the attack comes relatively late in the book, the greater part of which is concerned with the tragedy that preceded it – one that didn’t make international headlines”.

This is the death, from unknown causes, of her best friend and fellow poet Kamilah Aisha Moon, who’d been expected at the wedding, but had “failed to turn up”. Only late on the day itself did Griffiths learn what happened, making it “the best and worst day of my life”. Her memoir – which is “preoccupied with death and trauma” while also being, at times, “surprisingly funny” – is an account of Griffiths’ “formation as a poet and artist, an evolution inseparable from her friendship” with Moon.

This is a “frank and disorientating memoir”, said Helen Brown in The Telegraph. It records the abuse Griffiths experienced as a child, and the depression and anxiety that hospitalised her several times in her 20s. Despite her desire to write, she “struggled to find the words to break through her numbness”. It was only after meeting Moon, while studying creative writing in New York, that she began to recognise her artistic talent. Infected with “literary madness”, the pair “exchanged stories of trauma”, bonded over the black writers they loved (Alice Walker, June Jordan, Lucille Clifton), drank too much and wrote poetry together, said Leigh Haber in The Washington Post. While others discouraged Griffiths from writing, “Moon cheered her on”. Now, in this “open wound of a memoir”, she has honoured the woman she came to regard as her “chosen sister”.

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Griffiths also writes movingly of her relationship with Rushdie, whom she met in New York in 2017, said Fiona Sturges in The Guardian. While their early courtship is tinged with comedy – at their first meeting, he “collided with a plate-glass door that he thought was open” – their relationship becomes subsumed in the darker themes of the book. “Evocative” and “full-bodied”, if at times a “little overcooked”, “The Flower Bearers” is a “visceral depiction of violence, loss and emotional devastation” – but also a powerful “love story” and “portrait of sisterhood”.