When poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths married writer Salman Rushdie in 2021, she expected the day to be joyful. Their friends and family had gathered and Griffiths’ best friend, poet Kamilah Aisha Moon, was set to speak.

But Moon never showed up. Griffiths was still in her wedding dress when she learned that her friend had died. She says Moon’s death put her in a dissociative state; it was as though she were standing outside her own body.

“There was a moment literally where I felt I was looking down at this woman who was this gorgeous bride and the agony and anguish in her body,” Griffiths says. “She was screaming, people were holding her down so she wouldn’t hurt herself. And then I just left.”

Even now, Griffiths says, “Many parts of my wedding day are blacked out in my memory and are not available to me. … It’s very hard for me even to look at photographs or anything from my wedding day and feel connected to it.”

Eleven months after their wedding, Griffiths was home in New York City when she learned that Rushdie had been stabbed onstage at the Chautauqua Institution while being interviewed at a literary event. As she was rushing to be with him, Griffiths fell down a flight of stairs. It was a clarifying moment.

“When I got up and realized I hadn’t broken my neck or broken a bone, I just really was like, ‘That’s the last time you fall down. You cannot risk your safety. You cannot be running around with your head off your shoulders. You need to focus now,’” she says.

In the new memoir The Flower Bearers, Griffiths looks back on her wedding day and her marriage, and writes about her experience with dissociative identity disorder. She also reflects on her friendship with Moon, and how they initially connected over their shared identity as Black female poets.

Interview highlights

On caring for Rushdie in the immediate aftermath of the attack

I didn’t cry in the hospital room because I just didn’t think that would be helpful. And really, I didn’t have the energy. I had to conserve energy for all of these different balls that were all in the air. And when you’ve just married someone and now you’re responsible for their survival … you don’t really have time to tally up how strong you are, how brave you are, how courageous you are you have to keep going. And I was in survivor mode. …

There were moments where I cried in a lot of corners and stairwells. And yeah, I threw up a lot. I was really sick. My whole body was in shock. … I don’t know how to explain it, I don’t know if it’s innate or learned, but when there is a lot pressure and things are kind of going to hell, I will focus and bear down. 

On the strength of her marriage

It’s hard to watch the love of your life struggle with blindness, with impaired mobility, to feel exhausted, but I’m also trying to really look at what is there. The knife didn’t take away the mind inside of my husband. It has not taken away his curiosity. It hasn’t taken away how romantic he is and how he loves to plan date nights for us and watching movies and traveling and trying to spend as much quality time together as we can.

I think this experience makes you think about time. And I think because I am married to someone who is much older than me, there is a sense of time, time passing, being present, and really filling the time up with love. … There’s a kind of indescribable bridge and bond we have having survived such an experience that has reinforced the most wondrous and beautiful and incandescent spaces of this marriage and this friendship. This friendship is beautiful. And I’m grateful for it. And that gives me a lot of strength and courage to just keep going.

On experiencing dissociation

It’s a part of my mind and my body that attempts to protect and cope in moments where I feel flight or fight and I’m trying to get away from something, often externally. Or it can be a memory that might cause me a pain or a kind of mental assault that I will not be able to withstand. … I’ve learned to see my dissociative identity disorder as a protector. I’ve befriended it. I’ve learned so much about it so that I don’t feel like I’m out of control or I don’t know what’s happening.

On her alter egos

One of the things I write about is how, if you picture maybe the same version of yourself in a car, there are different people driving it at different times, but you’re all in the same car. … My alter as an artist is connected to my alter who was a young child and my alter who in my 20s as a young woman struggling to be an artist and becoming the person I’m still becoming. That’s a different set of memories and a different kind of character. But they all kind of visit me. I have a future alter, who is a really lovely, kind of bold, dazzling older woman. And her name is June. And so she helps me not sweat the small stuff. And she has a lot of humor and style and is chic. And she takes care of me. 

On pushing back against the cliché of the “tortured” artist

When you glamorize tortured poets or tortured artists, there’s an injustice that they become silhouettes and cutouts, their humanity is removed from them. They’re not seen as three-dimensional. … You know, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, or even Amy Winehouse … [and] Whitney Houston. There’s so many names of people … [whose] pain becomes the engine that drives the ship. …

What has now happened by writing this book is I don’t have shame. I don’t feel shame. I am using my voice to say this is my journey and I hope it can help someone else. When I was younger, having no money, being broke, being defeated, being depressed, that didn’t lead me to write my best work. I was in survivor mode. Once I was able to get stabilized and start to do the inner work and start to heal, I’ll always be healing, you know? I’ll be healing. But this feels like one of the first steps for me in a new life. And I’m really grateful for that. 

Anna Bauman and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.