THE FLOWER BEARERS, by Rachel Eliza Griffiths
There is something almost brazenly old-school about “The Flower Bearers,” Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ elegant and juicy new memoir. Most every sentence is hewed by the brutal chisel mastered in the cutthroat creative programs where Griffiths excelled as a student.
Her book, with its cover image of a woman in literal bloom, conjures readings crowded with eager thinkers and dive bars where poetry chapbooks are dissected along with literary love lives.
Griffiths is, after all, the fifth wife of Salman Rushdie, the prizewinning novelist some 30 years her senior who, after living for decades under a fatwa issued by the former Supreme Leader of Iran for his 1988 novel “The Satanic Verses,” survived an assassination attempt in 2022 that cost him his right eye, among other serious injuries.
Intertwined with this love story and her account of an artist’s origin is the emotionally painstaking tale of a friendship between two Black women writers: Griffiths and the poet Kamilah Aisha Moon. They met as graduate students judging poems for an anthology, and soon became each other’s “chosen sister.”
On Griffiths and Rushdie’s wedding day, the bride learns that Aisha has died suddenly, hundreds of miles away. Eleven months later, as she was still coming to terms with that collision of joy and grief, Rushdie was attacked by a knife-wielding assailant. Within the descriptions of emotional havoc and her husband’s “widowed eye” lies the underlying aim of Griffiths’ book: storytelling unafraid of poetry.
Like a pudding, the prose here is both plain and rich. “Leaning towards each other,” she writes of Moon, “a special space emerged where we felt safe to share who we were, who we were becoming and what from our pasts was keeping us from claiming the promises of our futures.”
Alongside the output of writers like Margo Jefferson, Glory Edim and Quiara Alegría Hudes, “The Flower Bearers” does the bold work of meticulously parsing women’s lives and relationships — work that has been successfully (and strategically) branded as “navel gazing.”
As Black women continue to battle historic underrepresentation in creative fields and reel from the recent blow of 300,000-plus jobs swiped from the American work force, the details of their friendships feel intensely relevant. Those intoxicating, can’t-stop-confiding-in-each-other moments are soulfully rendered throughout.
For long stretches, “The Flower Bearers” is an un-self-conscious conveyance of that time in life when nothing is impossible and dreams are jet fuel — but when everything can also seem dire, and heartache unendurable.
While she and Moon “understood the contexts” of the suicides of writers like Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, Griffiths recalls, “literary madness was also a dangerous and admired anthem between us, though we knew the danger of romanticizing and glamorizing tortured poets.”
That Griffiths’ mother “didn’t really have a childhood” is the cliff from which she jumps into frank talk about her own struggles with dissociative identity disorder and suicidal ideation. And when the narrative twists toward Griffiths’ life with Rushdie, she rolls out earnest, brainy sensuality: “I remember the black silk negligee dress I wore to the darkened, candlelit restaurant where Salman first told me he loved me. … I remember the air rushing across the blades of my exposed shoulders as the words were whispered against my collarbone.”
It’s a lot, but it’s also gratifyingly lush. Griffiths gives us romance and romanticism. She is unafraid of what might get shouted down as cringe, piling on textural and lyrical detail: hospital waiting areas, literary receptions tense with ambition and the kind of rooftop cocktail parties where you might meet a man like Sir Salman Rushdie.
Even before their acquaintance, Griffiths’ life as a successful poet was rarefied. There’s the “too-sweet champagne” she sips at the Princeton Club after meeting Toni Morrison. Later, there are dinners with the likes of Martin Amis and sparkly nights at TriBeCa’s swank power restaurant Mr. Chow.
Rushdie himself is amber-lit as a hot date — even a “driven Gemini.” And though Griffith writes that he “didn’t want me to disappear inside of his extraordinary life,” beneath the vodka-tonic-and-vintage-R&B details of their courtship is the tension not only of will they or won’t they, but will they or won’t they become Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, Beyoncé and Jay Z, Didion and Dunne? The stakes, at the intersection of warning and promise, are compelling and high.
There is no grail so holy as the truth of one’s own story. And to tell it so that others may find meaning there requires self-awareness minus the safe distances of irony or sarcasm — as well as belief that one’s story is worthy of being told.
Griffiths, instead of erecting a tombstone for her friend or compiling a mere scrapbook of her marriage, chose to create a group portrait of those who believe in her journey, with herself gloriously at the center. That is what glows here more than the wooing, the quaint sparkle of a privileged literati world or even the grief — a profound sureness of self that one usually comes by the hard way.
THE FLOWER BEARERS | By Rachel Eliza Griffiths | Random House | 334 pp. | $29
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