Flower Bearers Review by Rachel Eliza Griffiths – A powerful portrait of loss and violence | Biography and memoirs

TThe night before her wedding to Salman Rushdie in 2021, American poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths was worried about her best friend. Kamla Aisha Moon was scheduled to read a poem at the ceremony, but no one heard from her. Her phone was going straight to voicemail, and staff at her hotel said she hadn’t checked in. “We’ll find her,” Griffith’s sister, Melissa, assured her. “She won’t miss your wedding.” But the next afternoon, in the middle of her wedding, Griffiths learned that Moon had died alone at her home in Atlanta of unknown causes. When she heard the news, she collapsed, hit her head on the table and lost consciousness. The paramedics opened her eyes to shine a torch on them: “A particle of light so far away from the world I knew before.”

For Griffiths, 47, the death of her best friend and “chosen sister” was one in a series of turmoil that stretched over a decade. It started with the death of her mother, who was her greatest fan and fiercest critic. She instilled in her daughter the importance of “independence above all else. I was raised not to lose myself in other people’s stories, especially men.”

In 2017, Griffiths met and fell in love with Rushdie at a literary gathering, where he crashed into a glass door he thought was open, leaving him with a bloody head and a bruised ego. Next came the epidemic, during which two of Griffith’s uncles died.

But there was worse to come. Less than a year after Moon’s death, a stranger attempted to assassinate Rushdie. The author, against whom Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa in 1989, suffered near-fatal injuries to his neck, chest, hand and eye. Rushdie later wrote about the attack in his book The Knife.

The Flower Bearers reflects these events and more in a story that moves back and forth across the decades. It is the first memoir written by Griffiths, who has published five volumes of poetry and a novel entitled The Promise. The book is a love story, a portrait of sisterhood, and a profound depiction of violence, loss, and emotional devastation. For Griffiths, the murder of her friend and the attempted murder of her husband were “a strange Janus coin that… [spun] Around the silent and bloodstained land of my mind.

As one might expect from an author whose primary medium is poetry, the writing is evocative, full-bodied, and perhaps a little over-the-top in parts. Griffith is an earnest soul who is completely attuned to the complexities of human interactions and the chaos of her inner world. Although she skates over some troubling aspects of her story—there’s a passing mention of sexual violence and a serious suicide attempt in her early twenties—it’s expansive and moving in her diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder. Griffith’s struggles with a mental health condition led her to call a suicide hotline in 2013. Without her knowledge, police were notified and sent to her Brooklyn apartment, where they demanded entry. Once inside, they dropped her to the ground and handcuffed her, ignoring her requests to walk with them to the waiting ambulance. “I was never arrested for any crime, but my mental illness criminalized me,” she says.

The Flower Bearers goes to some dark places, but there is joy too, most notably in his portrait of Griffith and Moon’s friendship, full of tenderness. The pair met in New York when they were graduate students studying creative writing in the mid-2000s, working multiple jobs and living the good life. Their connection to music, poetry, and the challenges black women face in making their way in the world was strengthened. They both felt “safe to share who we are, who we have become, and what holds us back from claiming the promises of our future from our past.”

In the final chapters, Griffith embarks on a journey to the American South to honor Moon and the writers who inspired them, and to confront the grief that threatens to overwhelm her. In doing so, you learn to accept loss as a part of life. “I know that life demands death and births every day. But it also insists on singing and dancing and suffering and survival and love. There is a final hour before me somewhere, and it will be my own too, as intimate as my first breath.”

The Flower Bearers by Rachel Eliza Griffiths is published by John Murray (£22). To support The Guardian, order your copy from guardianbookshop.comIn the United Kingdom and Ireland, Samaritans You can call toll-free at 1. Delivery fees may apply.