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.

I was holding onto the barre, trying to keep my heels together in first position, but my legs were shaking. This wasn’t supposed to be so hard — especially for someone like me who regularly works out — but it felt like a total reach.

The Barrelates class at FOLM, a new studio that opened in September 2025 in Melrose Hill, blends barre and Pilates into a slow-burn flow designed for low-energy days. I was a few days from my period and even getting off my couch seemed like a stretch. Two other women moved quietly beside me, nobody chatting, all of us seemingly running on fumes. On the way in, I had seen women in the reformer room chatting animatedly as they packed up. Even that seemed exhausting.

At my old gym, a scrappy Muay Thai spot that has since closed, the trainers saw me on my best days and my worst. Some weeks I’d walk in and destroy everyone in sparring. Other weeks I couldn’t do a push-up on my knees. The coaches didn’t know the difference (which, fair, I wasn’t updating them on my cycle) — they just yelled at me to go harder. I’d push through, wondering why I was so lazy, so inconsistent, so weak.

It wasn’t until my late 30s, after I changed my birth control and started getting regular periods for the first time in years, that I started paying close attention to my body’s signals. The week I wanted a burger, I got the burger. The day I felt too depleted for kickboxing, I took a walk instead. I stopped fighting my body and started listening to it.

FOLM is built around this idea. The name stands for follicular, ovulation, luteal and menstrual — the four phases of the menstrual cycle — and the class schedule offers different intensities throughout the day so women can choose based on where they are hormonally. Circuit training and power reformer for high-energy days. Barrelates and classical Pilates for when you’re running on empty.

Two weeks later, I returned for the reformer class. This time, the room felt like a party. I’m something of a Pilates connoisseur, and the class hit all the familiar beats, challenging and satisfying. Afterward, two women made plans to hit a farmers market and grab coffee. Three others beelined toward the infrared sauna. I checked my phone and remembered I had a full day ahead, and the energy to tackle it. The workout felt almost incidental.

The cycle syncing trend is rising. But is it backed by science?

FOLM is part of a growing conversation around “cycle syncing,” the practice of tailoring exercise, diet and lifestyle to the hormonal shifts of the menstrual cycle. On social media, the concept has exploded, and the language of hormonal phases has entered everyday conversation. The science, though, is still catching up.

Instructor and co-founder Cindy Gomez, center, leads a reformer-based class.FOLM student, above. Micaela Ricca, exercises in the weight room studio designed with a blend of barre, mat and circuit training, below.

Advertisement

“Reproductive-age women from puberty to menopause have significant cyclic changes in their sex hormones during the course of their menstrual cycle,” says Dr. Kacey M. Hamilton, an OBGYN at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. These hormonal shifts affect more than just the reproductive system — they influence mood, digestion and potentially injury risk. Hamilton points to research on female athletes that found higher rates of ligament injuries at certain points in the cycle, likely linked to progesterone and estrogen’s effects on connective tissue.

But Hamilton stops short of endorsing cycle-based fitness programs. “There’s never been any literature that said, hey, women who follow cycle thinking have better strength outcomes or have more energy,” she says. “None of it has outcomes data to support it thus far.”

Her concern is over complication. “Lifestyle changes and healthy lifestyle choices are difficult for all of us,” she says. Hamilton worries that if a woman believes she should rest for two weeks out of the month, she might miss the resistance training crucial for bone health and longevity.

Co-founders Anna Collins, left, and Cindy Gomez at FOLM fitness studio.

A “recovery womb,” hormone-balancing snacks and lots of hormone talk

The founders of FOLM, Anna Collins, 30, and Cindy Gomez, 35, say they’re not asking anyone to skip workouts. Both came to cycle syncing through experience. Collins noticed her ballet pirouettes suffered during her luteal phase; Gomez saw women pushing through heated Pilates classes until they nearly passed out. “After class, we’d ask, ‘When was your last period?’’ Gomez said. “And they’d be like, ‘Oh yeah, I’m supposed to get it tomorrow.’ It’s like, OK, maybe you shouldn’t be doing HIIT in 100-degree heat.”

The studio also offers what the founders call “the recovery womb.” An infrared sauna that fits five and runs 20-minute sessions. Unlike traditional saunas, infrared heats you from within, and the founders recommend going in after class when you’re already warm so you sweat more effectively. (Though they suggest skipping it when you’re actually bleeding, since you’re already depleted.)

There is also a vibration plate that, Collins and Gomez say, can help with lymphatic drainage before or after class. There’s bone broth and seed-cycling cookies, both made in-house by Gomez, who is a certified nutrition health coach, with seeds meant to support hormone balance at different phases. In January, a cycle coach joins the team to lead workshops on syncing not just workouts but nutrition, creativity — even finances — to the menstrual cycle.

At FOLM, nothing is mandatory. “We want our clients to be listening to what their body is telling them,” Gomez says. “Even during your luteal phase, if you take the lighter class, you’re still challenging yourself.”

Hamilton sees value in this body awareness. “My favorite thing about the current online conversation is that it’s getting people familiar with their cycle,” she says. A few years ago, her patients rarely knew the difference between follicular and luteal phases. Now they talk hormones fluently. “Information is so powerful.”

FOLM is also women-only, welcoming anyone who identifies as a woman or nonbinary. The founders expected pushback but say it hasn’t come. “I’ve been teaching for years, and I see a huge difference in how women feel here,” Collins says.

Whether this approach delivers measurable fitness results remains unproven. But that Barrelates class — hard, but not too hard — was exactly what I needed on a day I almost didn’t show up. The idea behind the Barrelates class, Collins says, is that you’re never not moving, so the flow keeps your mind on the physical rather than whatever is happening emotionally. After the reformer class two weeks later, I had energy to spare. Next time, maybe I’ll try Barrelates when both my body and mind are showing up.

Matt Damon and Ben Affleck share the screen again in new Netflix film, The Rip. Similar to the pulpy, midbudget cop movies we used to get, The Rip is about a team of cops who are trying to take a huge stash of money from a drug cartel. But that work is not only dangerous, but also complicated as they encounter more money than they expected. The cast also includes Steven Yeun, Teyana Taylor, and Kyle Chandler.

Follow Pop Culture Happy Hour on Letterboxd at letterboxd.com/nprpopculture