Poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths On Love, Tragedy & ‘Survivor Mode’

This is fresh air. I'm Terry Gross. The day that writer Rachel Eliza Griffiths married writer Salman Rushdie was expected to be one of the best, perhaps the best day of her life. But her dearest friend Ayesha, who was set to speak at the wedding, never arrived, because she suddenly, shockingly died.

That triggered Griffith's dissociative identity disorder. She'll explain what that means a little later. It was only eleven months after the wedding that Rushdie was stabbed multiple times while being interviewed on stage at the Chautauqua Festival near Buffalo, New York. Griffith was home in New York City at the time and had to figure out how to get to her husband, not knowing whether she'd find him still alive, what their future would be, what her future would be. When she got to the ICU, he was hanging on to his life.

His face was so disfigured from the wounds, the stab that blinded him, and the swelling that she refused to allow him to look in a mirror. Griffiths new memoir, The Flower Bearers, covers this period, as well as her childhood, which pretty much ended when she was eleven or twelve, and her mother was diagnosed with kidney disease. She also writes about her relationship with Ayesha and how they initially connected over being black female poets, trying to find their voices as writers, and a place in the literary world. Rachel Eliza Griffiths is also the author of the novel Promise and several poetry collections, including Seeing the Body.

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