THE FLOWER BEARERS

A poet and novelist chronicles years of extraordinary love and loss.

Opening her memoir with an image of her hennaed hands on her wedding day in 2021, Griffith shares the sense of amazement she felt as she prepared to “exchange vows with a wondrous man, a man I’ve called my ‘boyfriend’ for the past four years. My ‘boy­friend’ is three decades older than me. My ‘boyfriend’ is older than my father. My ‘boyfriend’ is one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.” The one off-key note on the day the author became Salman Rushdie’s fifth wife was the unexplained absence of her best friend of 17 years, the poet Kamilah Aisha Moon, who was supposed to speak at the wedding. The ceremony was not long over when Griffiths learned her friend had died that morning. Much of what follows is devoted to charting the path of this cherished friendship, from their meeting as grad students at Sarah Lawrence and finding joy in music, dancing, food, and poetry to their shared rage and sorrow during the pandemic and in the period following the death of George Floyd. “The inhumanity of Floyd’s murder ravaged America’s bloodstained roots. Memories surfaced like warped bruises. America’s history was a vicious scab, reopened and raw….Had we honestly ever believed that America would put down her guns and her nooses?” Not a full year after her friend’s death came Griffiths’ husband’s near-fatal stabbing at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York. This section of the narrative revisits the chilling details of Rushdie’s difficult, almost miraculous recovery, also recounted in his memoir, Knife. In the final section, the author finds her way into the creative project that will release her from these multiple traumas, beginning by immersing herself in the archives of “literary foremothers” like Toni Morrison, Lucille Clifton, and Alice Walker.

This profoundly felt account moves between the raw, the lyrical, and the elegiac as it seeks the light of healing.