Overview

'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.

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9781399813952

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Reviews

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 * In writing such a raw and open tribute to courage - Aisha's, Rushdie's, her own, as well as the writers who have gone before - she has reached an accommodation with that grief, and found a way to transmute it into poetry * Observer * Rachel Eliza Griffith's powerful memoir stunned me. With a poet's precision, she renders two interwoven tragedies few others could've lived through, much less written about with such clear-eyed candor. Love powers both tales, and that's the source of the book's deep grace. She blesses us all with a survivor's singular memoir destined to be celebrated for aeons * Mary Karr * A beautiful and immensely powerful book about love, grief and finding a way to be in a forever altered world -- Julia Samuel This profoundly felt account moves between the raw, the lyrical, and the elegiac as it seeks the light of healing * Kirkus, starred review * Unsparing and full-throated. In The Flower Bearers, grief is to love as pain is to pleasure. Through the lens of a poet and documentarian, Griffiths deftly explores what it is to bear witness and to remain present. The Flower Bearers offers a transformative testament to the fragility of life and the compulsion to look when others look away. Griffiths' call to document and make sense of the horror, the fear, and the gut-wrenching pain of loss is, at its core, an exploration of capacity, resilience, and the deeply human need to remain open to love in all its forms. -- A. M. Holmes What a gift The Flower Bearers is. Tenderly, carefully, Rachel Eliza Griffiths excavates deep into matters of her heart, and her sentences make space for readers to do the same. Griffiths writes with beauty and consideration, not just about what happens when grief wrecks your foundations, but the light that emerges through those cracks. This is a precise and intentional masterwork, that reminded me of the power of love that endures. -- Caleb Azumah Nelson

Rachel Eliza Griffith's powerful memoir stunned me. With a poet's precision, she renders two interwoven tragedies few others could've lived through, much less written about with such clear-eyed candor. Love powers both tales, and that's the source of the book's deep grace. She blesses us all with a survivor's singular memoir destined to be celebrated for aeons * Mary Karr *

Rachel Eliza Griffith's powerful memoir stunned me. With a poet's precision, she renders two interwoven tragedies few others could've lived through, much less written about with such clear-eyed candor. Love powers both tales, and that's the source of the book's deep grace. She blesses us all with a survivor's singular memoir destined to be celebrated for aeons * Mary Karr * A beautiful and immensely powerful book about love, grief and finding a way to be in a forever altered world -- Julia Samuel This profoundly felt account moves between the raw, the lyrical, and the elegiac as it seeks the light of healing * Kirkus, starred review *

Author Information

Rachel Eliza Griffiths is an artist, poet, and novelist. Her recent hybrid collection of poetry and photography, Seeing the Body, was selected as the winner of the 2021 Hurston/Wright Foundation Award in Poetry, the winner of the 2020 Paterson Poetry Prize, and a finalist for the 2021 NAACP Image Award. Griffiths' work has appeared widely, including The New Yorker, the Paris Review, Best American Poetry (2020, 2021), Tin House, and many others. Her debut novel, Promise, was published in 2023. She lives in New York City.

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