NEW YORK — After her best friend died on the day Rachel Eliza Griffiths married Salman Rushdie and her husband was nearly stabbed to death a year later, the author and multimedia artist was left with no choice over what she would write about next.
“I think there was a struggle when I tried not to put it into words, when I tried to avoid it, when I thought, ‘All of these life events have happened to me, but now I’m going to think about my next novel and my next collection of poetry,’” says Griffiths, whose memoir “The Flower Bearers” releases Tuesday. She ultimately conceded, “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 Flower Bearers" comes out nearly two years after "Knife," Rushdie's account of the 2022 assault that hospitalized him and blinded him in one eye. Griffiths' book is framed around Rushdie and her close bond with poet Kamilah Aisha Moon, whose death is ever entwined with her wedding, an "uncanny Janus coin."
As she writes in "The Flower Bearers," Griffiths and Rushdie met at a PEN America event in May 2017, a relationship sealed out of a mishap that seems comic compared to what happened later: As they were stepping out onto a terrace, Rushdie banged into a plate glass door and fell, bleeding. He was embarrassed and in pain and wanted to leave. She offered to ride home with him and ice the wounds on his head and nose.
“We talked and laughed for hours,” she wrote.
She well knew Rushdie's history, the 1989 fatwa from Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini that called for the author's death because of the alleged blasphemy of his novel "The Satanic Verses." But she, and Rushdie, thought his days of fearing for his life were well behind him — until Aug. 12, 2022. She was alone in her living room, drinking coffee, when a friend called and told her that Rushdie had been "hurt."
Rushdie was preparing to deliver a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution, in western New York, when a man rushed to the stage and stabbed him repeatedly. (The assailant, Hadi Matar, has since been sentenced by a state judge to 25 years in prison for assault and attempted murder.)
“Please don't take him away from me yet,” Griffiths remembers thinking. “Please don't let Salman die.”
A prizewinning poet, novelist, photographer and filmmaker, the 47-year-old Griffiths is a graduate from the creative writing program at Sarah Lawrence College, where Moon was a fellow student. Before Griffiths met Rushdie or Moon, she had endured grief and trauma and the fear of a loved one being in peril. Her beloved mother had suffered from poor health since Griffiths was a girl and died in 2014, at 59. Griffiths is also a survivor of sexual violence who has struggled with mental health issues and says she deals with PTSD on a daily basis.
Her book echoes Rushdie's beyond their memories of each other. Rushdie, who last year published the story collection "The Eleventh Hour," told The Associated Press at the time that he couldn't get back to other kinds of writing until he completed his memoir. And, like "Knife," Griffiths' memoir is a story of improbable resilience, what she calls the discovery of grace in the midst and aftermath of malicious violence and cruel luck.
“I can kind of look back and think, ‘Wow, that woman, she was tough as nails,’” she says. “I’m very different than the Rachel Eliza who wrote this book, and the Rachel Eliza who was living through all of these experiences. In the moment, people would say, ‘Be strong, be strong.’ And I’m like, well, ‘I am strong.’”
Griffiths spoke with the AP about Rushdie, Moon, the writing of her book and her feelings of gratitude. The interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
AP: Did you know a lot about Salman before you met him?
GRIFFITHS: Being in grad school, being in college, you’re reading things, you’re writing papers, you’re aware of him. And I feel like when I moved to New York and was in my own journey of being kind of a young writer, there was Salman Rushdie. But it was so far away from my life in Brooklyn. And I never was in a space where I was interacting with Salman Rushdie or he was in the room like that. So it was kind of this figure, this almost mythological Salman Rushdie figure, but there wasn’t any kind of immediate bridge or network of people or anything.
I remember specifically reading his memoir (about the fatwa), “Joseph Anton,” and feeling like, “I'm so glad he's OK.”
AP: Did Salman let you look at “Knife” while he was working on it? Did you let him see early drafts of “The Flower Bearers”?
GRIFFITHS: I did see a lot of “Knife” as he was going through the process of it. And I do think there were subjects in it that we discussed, how to approach them, especially if they involved other people. So in “Knife,” there’s the wedding, getting married. We decided because I was going to write “The Flower Bearers” that all of the details, all of the things that happened on the wedding day belonged to “The Flower Bearers.”
I’m more reticent to share things until I’ve really gotten a grip on myself. So I had to get through quite a bit of “The Flower Bearers” before I offered it to him to look at.
AP: What did he say?
GRIFFITHS: He was deeply moved.
AP: There's the old expression about writing to learn what you think. Did writing this book help you shape in your mind what happened? If you had the chance, what would you have told yourself, the person you were, 10 years ago?
GRIFFITHS: It would have been a very short conversation, because, it would have been like, “No way,” or “Shut up.”
I feel as I’ve come through writing this book that there were moments where parts of that younger writer were really stripped away from me and taken away from me, and there’s a kind of death of the self that happens when you are in deep shock and trauma and grief. There is a way when my friend Aisha was alive that I used to laugh or do certain things or hear certain songs that’s gone. It’s just in the book now. I don't stay up and talk on the phone all night anymore the way I used to stay up and talk on the phone with her. I listen to Stevie Wonder differently now that she’s not here. I think I was a different woman on Aug. 11 then who I had to become on Aug. 12.
AP: Now that you’ve written this book, are other things starting to come into your head, like poetry? Has a path been cleared?
GRIFFITHS: I definitely feel the path has opened up for me for poetry, for visual art. I feel as if I might want a break from language for a bit and plant myself a little bit more into my photography.
AP: You have a line from your (2020) collection “Seeing the Body,” in which you write, “Forgive my estranged affair with the present.” What’s your relationship with the present now?
GRIFFITHS: It’s not estranged now.
AP: It's reconciled?
GRIFFITHS: It’s reconciled. It’s realigned. It's immediate and it’s joyous. It’s joyous because I now know how easily I could not be here, how easily Salman could not be here.