Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s memoir examines friend’s death and the attack on Salman Rushdie

Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s first memoir, The Flower Bearers, recounts the sudden death of her best friend Kamilah Aisha Moon — who died alone at home in Atlanta of unknown causes during Griffiths’s 2021 wedding to Salman Rushdie — and the subsequent attempted assassination of Rushdie less than a year later.

The book traces a decade of upheavals that began with the death of Griffiths’s mother, and includes meeting Rushdie in 2017, the deaths of two uncles during the pandemic, and the night before the wedding when Moon, who was due to read a poem at the ceremony, could not be reached. Griffiths writes that on learning of Moon’s death she collapsed, hit her head and blacked out; paramedics later pried open her eyes to shine a torch on them: “A particle of light that is so distant from the world I once knew.” The memoir also records that Rushdie, who had a fatwa issued against him in 1989, sustained near-fatal stab wounds to his neck, chest, hand and eye, an attack he later wrote about in his book Knife.

The Flower Bearers moves across decades in a narrative that is at once a love story, a portrait of sisterhood and a depiction of violence, loss and emotional devastation.

Key Topics

Culture, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Salman Rushdie, Kamilah Aisha Moon, Atlanta, Dissociative Identity Disorder