‘To me, he is always Salman’: Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ memoir reclaims Rushdie from the icon

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 forties and based in New York, was a poet and photographer.

The two first met at a PEN World Voices Festival event in New York, where Rushdie was introducing a reading. Later that evening, Rushdie mistook a plate-glass door for an open exit and walked into it. “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. They spoke for hours and remained in contact.

This initial act of care establishes a poignant motif that runs through the memoir: the nursing of Rushdie, whether through illness or in the devastating aftermath of his stabbing.

However, she makes clear 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 memoir’s central episodes describes Rushdie meeting Griffiths’s father. Her father, a former corporate lawyer, knew little about Rushdie’s literary standing or the fatwa. His concerns were practical. After talking 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

Going into the relationship, Griffiths was cautious. The age difference was substantial, and Rushdie had been married four times previously. More significantly, his public history intruded. “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.”

They agreed on maintaining independent professional identities. “Elsewhere, he may be Sir Salman Rushdie. To me, he is always Salman,” she writes.

‘Salman fears he has ruined my life’

Almost a year after their marriage, in August 2022, Rushdie was stabbed multiple times onstage in New York state. In The Flower Bearers, she records the immediate aftermath from the perspective of someone waiting for news, arranging transport and confronting the possibility of widowhood. When reporters approach her outside her home, one asks, “What is your relationship to the Indian novelist Sir Salman Rushdie? Can you confirm that he is dead?” She describes entering the hospital trauma ward and seeing her husband’s injuries in detail: the damaged eye, the stitched face, the hand pierced by the knife.

Rushdie’s memoir “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder” (Jonathan Cape, 2024) recounts the attack from his own perspective. Rushdie is explicit about the limits of his own memory, noting that parts of the episode had to be reconstructed later from witness accounts and medical reports. “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 necessarily cannot, in the hospital after the attack. She records the injuries from the perspective of the person responsible for watching, waiting and responding. She describes the days after the attack in terms of medical care and vigilance. When he regained consciousness, she writes that he apologised repeatedly. “Salman fears he has ruined my life, dragging me into the long, gilded corridors of his own marvellous and dangerous existence,” she records. He asks her directly, “Are you afraid? Will you stay with me?”

What Salman Rushdie wrote

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie.

Rushdie addresses that fear from his own perspective in Knife. The dominant emotion he recalls after the attack is not anger but isolation. “What I felt most strongly was a profound loneliness,” he writes. “I would never see Eliza again.” Where Rushdie’s account turns inward, Griffiths’ records the outward facts of care: surgery, security protocols, rehabilitation and constant supervision.

As recovery gives way to routine, Griffiths documents the long-term realities of living with a partner whose body has been permanently altered by violence and whose public identity continues to attract attention and risk. The consequences of the attack extend into ordinary moments of closeness. “Each morning I kiss my husband’s face, looking at the single blacked-out lens of the glasses he wears,” she writes. Alongside this physical change runs an awareness that safety cannot be promised. “I want to promise him that no one will ever hurt him again,” she adds, “but I know that is a lie.”

Rushdie, for his part, frames survival as a confrontation with the return of history. The attack does not strike him as new, but as belated. “It had been thirty-three and a half years since the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s notorious death order against me,” he writes, describing the assailant as “a murderous ghost from the past.”

In this sense, Knife treats the attack as the reassertion of an unfinished narrative, while The Flower Bearers records what it means to live inside that narrative after the fact, when violence has already done its work on the body and must be accommodated rather than resisted.