Author and multimedia artist Rachel Eliza Griffiths has released a powerful new memoir, 'The Flower Bearers', confronting the profound personal tragedies that reshaped her life and writing. The book details the aftermath of the near-fatal stabbing of her husband, Sir Salman Rushdie, and the death of her closest friend on her wedding day.
A Life Forced into New Words
Griffiths, 47, explains that after these seismic events, she had no choice but to write about them. "I think there was a struggle when I tried not to put it into words," she told the Associated Press. She realised she could not return to her previous creative projects, stating, "You cannot pass through these kinds of personal life events and ask your brain and your being to go back to who you were because you're not the same."
The memoir arrives nearly two years after Rushdie's own account of the attack, 'Knife'. Griffiths' work is framed around her bond with Rushdie and her deep friendship with poet Kamilah Aisha Moon, whose passing is forever linked to her wedding—an event she describes as an "uncanny Janus coin."
The Day Everything Changed
Griffiths and Rushdie met at a PEN America event in May 2017, their relationship beginning with a comic mishap when Rushdie walked into a glass door. Their lives were violently upended on 12 August 2022. Rushdie was preparing to lecture at New York's Chautauqua Institution when a man rushed the stage and stabbed him repeatedly. The assailant, Hadi Matar, was later sentenced to 25 years in prison.
"Please don't take him away from me yet," Griffiths recalls thinking upon hearing the news. "Please don't let Salman die." The attack left Rushdie hospitalised and blinded in one eye.
This was not Griffiths' first encounter with trauma. Her mother died in 2014 after long health struggles, she is a survivor of sexual violence, and she manages PTSD daily. 'The Flower Bearers' thus becomes a testament to what she terms "improbable resilience"—finding grace after malicious violence and cruel luck.
A Collaborative and Cathartic Process
Griffiths and Rushdie navigated their writing collaboratively. She saw early drafts of 'Knife', and they decided that the intimate details of their wedding day would belong to her memoir. She was more reticent to share, only showing him her work once she had "gotten a grip" on the material. His response was that he was "deeply moved."
Reflecting on the writing process, Griffiths notes it helped shape her understanding of the trauma. She acknowledges a "death of the self" that occurs in deep grief. The woman she was on 11 August 2022 was not the one she had to become on the 12th. Her relationship with the present, once "estranged" in her earlier poetry, is now "reconciled" and "joyous," born from the stark awareness of how easily life can be lost.
With this memoir complete, Griffiths feels a path has cleared for new poetry and visual art, though she may first turn to her photography for a break from language. Her journey, etched into the pages of 'The Flower Bearers', stands as a raw and powerful exploration of enduring love, inconsolable loss, and the hard-won strength to continue.
