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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.
"This profoundly felt account moves between the raw, the lyrical, and the elegiac as it seeks the light of healing." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"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." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"The Flower Bearers is a memoir of duality, of intoxicating love and excruciating loss. 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, author of Memorial Days
"In prose as luminous as her verse, Rachel Eliza Griffiths has written a testament to the human spirit's ability to withstand a sundering—and to emerge with a heart made wider by the breaking." —Suleika Jaouad, author of Between Two Kingdoms
This information about The Flower Bearers 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.
Photo: © Beowulf Sheehan
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. Promise is her first novel.
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