The Flower Bearers: A Memoir

In her stunning debut memoir, poet and novelist Griffiths (Promise) details the most challenging period of her life, during which her best friend died and her husband, the author Salman Rushdie, was brutally attacked. In sumptuous prose, Griffiths recounts her friendship with the poet Kamilah Aisha Moon, whom she met when both were graduate students at Sarah Lawrence College in the early 2000s, and her romance with Rushdie, which ignited after they crossed paths at a literary festival in 2017. On the day of Griffiths and Rushdie’s 2021 wedding, Moon failed to show. Griffiths then learned that Moon had died suddenly in Atlanta the same morning. “This was the kind of grief that answered before your name was called,” Griffiths writes. “The kind of grief that left you nameless and skinless.” She spent the subsequent months mourning Moon and cataloging other traumas, from the death of her mother years earlier to the horrors wrought by the Covid pandemic. Eleven months later, Rushdie was near-fatally stabbed during a speech in Chautaqua, N.Y. 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. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency. (Jan.)