The Flower Bearers

‘A beautiful and immensely powerful book about love, grief and finding a way to be in a forever altered world’ Julia Samuel

On September 24, 2021, Rachel Eliza Griffiths married her husband, the novelist Salman Rushdie. On the same day, hundreds of miles of away, Griffiths’ closest friend and chosen sister, the poet Kamilah Aisha Moon, who was expected to speak at the wedding, died suddenly. Eleven months later, as Griffiths attempted to piece together her life as a newlywed with heartbreak in one hand and immense love in the other, a brutal attack nearly killed her husband. As trauma compounded trauma, Griffiths realized that in order to survive her grief, she would need to mourn not only her friend, but the woman she had been on her wedding day, a woman who had also died that day.

In the process of rebuilding a self, Griffiths chronicles her friendship with Moon, the seventeen years since their meeting at Sarah Lawrence College. Together, they embraced their literary foremothers—Lucille Clifton, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, to name a few—and fought to embrace themselves as poets, artists, and Black women. Alongside this unbreakable bond, Griffiths weaves the story of her relationship with Rushdie, of the challenges they have faced and the unshakeable devotion that endures.

In The Flower Bearers, Griffiths inscribes the trajectories of two transformational relationships with grace and honesty, chronicling the beauty and pain that comes with opening oneself fully to love.

Author Biography

Rachel Eliza Griffiths is an artist, poet, and novelist. Her recent hybrid collection of poetry and photography, Seeing the Body, was selected as the winner of the 2021 Hurston/Wright Foundation Award in Poetry, the winner of the 2020 Paterson Poetry Prize, and a finalist for the 2021 NAACP Image Award. Griffiths’ work has appeared widely, including The New Yorker, the Paris Review, Best American Poetry (2020, 2021), Tin House, and many others. She lives in New York City.