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A Memoir of Living and Dying
by Nina Riggs
An exquisite memoir about how to live - and love - every day with "death in the room," from poet Nina Riggs, mother of two young sons and the direct descendant of Ralph Waldo Emerson, in the tradition of When Breath Becomes Air.
"We are breathless, but we love the days. They are promises. They are the only way to walk from one night to the other."
Nina Riggs was just thirty-seven years old when initially diagnosed with breast cancer - one small spot. Within a year, the mother of two sons, ages seven and nine, and married sixteen years to her best friend, received the devastating news that her cancer was terminal.
How does one live each day, "unattached to outcome"? How does one approach the moments, big and small, with both love and honesty?
Exploring motherhood, marriage, friendship, and memory, even as she wrestles with the legacy of her great-great-great grandfather, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nina Riggs's breathtaking memoir continues the urgent conversation that Paul Kalanithi began in his gorgeous When Breath Becomes Air. She asks, what makes a meaningful life when one has limited time?
Brilliantly written, disarmingly funny, and deeply moving, The Bright Hour is about how to love all the days, even the bad ones, and it's about the way literature, especially Emerson, and Nina's other muse, Montaigne, can be a balm and a form of prayer. It's a book about looking death squarely in the face and saying "this is what will be."
Especially poignant in these uncertain times, The Bright Hour urges us to live well and not lose sight of what makes us human: love, art, music, words.
"Starred Review. Moving and insightful...In this tender memoir Riggs displays a keen awareness of and reverence for all the moments of life - both the light, and the dark, 'the cruel, and the beautiful.'" - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Riggs reminds us that we are all in this world until we leave it; the gallows humor surrounding her mother's funeral will make readers howl guiltily but appreciatively. Whether confronting disease or not, everyone should read this beautifully crafted book as it imbues life and loved ones with a particularly transcendent glow." - Library Journal
"Starred Review. A luminous, heartbreaking symphony of wit, wisdom, pain, parenting, and perseverance" - Kirkus
"Gorgeous and brave, Nina Riggs's memoir explodes with life and insight even amid ruin – with lines so poetic they knocked the wind out of me. It's heartbreaking, funny, clear-eyed, and entirely devoid of cliché. This book is her hard-won treasure, and ours." - Lucy Kalanithi
"How a woman can have this much emotional clarity and narrative power while fighting for her life should astonish every last one of us. Magical. Unforgettable." - Kelly Corrigan, New York Times bestselling author of The Middle Place and Glitter and Glue
"Nina Riggs could have written a memoir about dying. Instead, she has given us a book exploding with life. Every page of The Bright Hour ('bright' the operative word here) is filled with the mysterious, messy, funny, heartbreaking stuff that only happens in the most loving of families. Clearly, hers is one... What a gift she has given to her family, and to any reader of this beautiful book." - Joyce Maynard, New York Times bestselling author of Under the Influence, At Home in the World, and Labor Day
"Nina Riggs writes gorgeously and with astonishing clarity about her own terminal illness, about losing her mother, about her marriage and her children, about books that have guided her, and also about the often comical challenges of daily life as a busy parent...This is an emotional journey told with raw honesty and also a sly sense of humor. "The Bright Hour is an instant classic that deserves to be read by everyone who loved When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi and Being Mortal by Atul Guwande." - Will Schwalbe, New York Times bestselling author of The End of Your Life Bookclub and Books For Living
"Once I started this book, I couldn't stop reading. Profound, absorbing, and often even funny, Nina Riggs's memoir of living and dying is a meditation on life, family, and how to cram every day of our existence with what we love - no matter how much time we have left. Brilliant and illuminating." - Gretchen Rubin, New York Times bestselling author of The Happiness Project and Better Than Before
This information about The Bright Hour was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Nina Riggs received her MFA in poetry in 2004 and published a book of poems, Lucky, Lucky, in 2009. She wrote about life with metastatic breast cancer on her blog, Suspicious Country; her recent work has appeared in The Washington Post and The New York Times. She lived with her husband and sons and dogs in Greensboro, North Carolina. She is the author of The Bright Hour.
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