On the day Rachel Eliza Griffiths married Sir Salman Rushdie in September 2021, an unarticulated horror seemed to be looming over the celebration. While she exchanged vows, unbeknownst to her, the poet Kamilah Aisha Moon, her closest friend and chosen sister, had suddenly died that morning. “This is how our marriage begins,” Griffiths writes in her memoir, “The Flower Bearers” (John Murray Press, 2026), “hushed in the aura of raw grief.” That horror would foreshadow another horror in the year to come, the brutal stabbing of Rushdie as he stood on a New York stage.
While it interacts with one of the most public acts of literary violence in recent history, Griffiths’ memoir ait its heart is a story of selfhood and love.
When Rushdie ‘fell’ in love a fifth time
When Salman Rushdie met Rachel Eliza Griffiths in 2017, he was 70 and had lived for years under police protection after a fatwa was issued against him in 1989. Griffiths, then in her early 40s was a poet and photographer based in New York.
The two met for the first time at a PEN World Voices Festival event in New York, where Rushdie was introducing a reading. Later that evening, Rushdie accidentally walked into a plate-glass door. “Hitting the glass at full momentum sent him immediately to the floor,” Griffiths writes. He was bleeding, his glasses were broken and “a sizable knot blooming on the dome of his head.” Seeing him disoriented, Griffiths accompanied him home. “People are going to think I beat you up,” she teased him. That was the first time she nursed him, and as it would transpire her role as a caregiver becomes a poignant thread that runs through the memoir, be it nursing Rushdie through illness or after he was stabbed.
She insists that she fell in love with the man, not the literary monument. “Salman Rushdie had nothing to do with my life,” she writes, recalling that his name surfaced occasionally in popular culture (Jeopardy and Law and Order episodes), but did not shape her artistic world. One of the anecdotes Griffiths narrates about their courtship is the day Rushdie meeting Griffiths’s father, a former corporate lawyer. After talking to Rushdie for an hour, her father asked, “Where would I find some of these books you say you’ve written? Would they know your name at Barnes & Noble?”
The weight of being Sir Salman Rushdie
She candidly confesses to being concerned about their substantial age difference, and the fact, that Rushdie had previously been married four times. “Salman’s past was something he’d assured me was behind him. But that wasn’t true,” she writes. “I’d observed how much his past appeared when we went out together. People brought it up.”
“Elsewhere, he may be Sir Salman Rushdie. To me, he is always Salman,” she writes. They decided to maintain independent professional identities, which did not merge except in this memoir.
‘Salman fears he has ruined my life’
The New York stabbing took place in August 2022, almost a year into their marriage. In The Flower Bearers, Griffiths writes about the incident from the perspective of a worried loved one waiting for news, while dealing with practicalities such as arranging transport, all the while confronting the possibility of widowhood. She recalls being approached by reporters outside her home. “What is your relationship to the Indian novelist Sir Salman Rushdie? Can you confirm that he is dead?” they recall them asking at a time when she too had just heard of the attack. She describes the horror of entering the hospital trauma ward and cataloguing her husband’s injuries, including his damaged eye, stitched face, and hand pierced by the knife.
Accompanied reading would be Rushdie’s memoir “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder” (Jonathan Cape, 2024) where he recounts the attack from his perspective. “What follows is a collage,” he writes, “with bits of my memory pieced together with other eyewitness and news reports.” He characterises the attack as a rupture in the ordinary rules of behaviour and perception, observing that “violence smashes that picture” of the world’s stability and coherence.
Griffiths’ account begins where Rushdie’s cannot, in the hospital after the attack. When he regained consciousness, she writes, the Midnight’s Children author apologised to her repeatedly. “Salman fears he has ruined my life, dragging me into the long, gilded corridors of his own marvellous and dangerous existence,” she says, and recalls him asking her, “Are you afraid? Will you stay with me?”
“What I felt most strongly was a profound loneliness,” Rushdie recounts in his own memoir. “I would never see Eliza again.”
What Salman Rushdie wrote
Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie.
Griffiths writes about her role as a caregiver, and coming to terms with living with a partner whose body has been permanently altered by violence, and who remains at risk. “Each morning I kiss my husband’s face, looking at the single blacked-out lens of the glasses he wears,” she writes. “I want to promise him that no one will ever hurt him again,” she adds, “but I know that is a lie.”
“It had been thirty-three and a half years since the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s notorious death order against me,” he writes of the continued risk to his existance, describing the assailant as “a murderous ghost from the past.”
Both memoirs touch on Rushdie’s stabbing, but while Knife treats the attack as a reassertion of an unfinished narrative, The Flower Bearers records what it means to be a caregiver, and to love someone whose life is constantly at risk.
Salman Rushdie, Poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths' new memoir, 'The Flower Bearers'. 
Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie.
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