told The Associated Press<\/a> at the time that he couldn’t get back to other kinds of writing until he completed his memoir. And, like \u201cKnife,\u201d Griffiths’ memoir is a story of improbable resilience, what she calls the discovery of grace in the midst and aftermath of malicious violence and cruel luck.<\/p>\n\u201cI can kind of look back and think, \u2018Wow, that woman, she was tough as nails,\u2019\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m very different than the Rachel Eliza who wrote this book, and the Rachel Eliza who was living through all of these experiences. In the moment, people would say, \u2018Be strong, be strong.\u2019 And I\u2019m like, well, \u2018I am strong.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Griffiths spoke with the AP about Rushdie, Moon, the writing of her book and her feelings of gratitude. The interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.<\/p>\n
AP: Did you know a lot about Salman before you met him?<\/h2>\n
GRIFFITHS: Being in grad school, being in college, you\u2019re reading things, you\u2019re writing papers, you\u2019re aware of him. And I feel like when I moved to New York and was in my own journey of being kind of a young writer, there was Salman Rushdie. But it was so far away from my life in Brooklyn. And I never was in a space where I was interacting with Salman Rushdie or he was in the room like that. So it was kind of this figure, this almost mythological Salman Rushdie figure, but there wasn\u2019t any kind of immediate bridge or network of people or anything.<\/p>\n
I remember specifically reading his memoir (about the fatwa), \u201cJoseph Anton,\u201d and feeling like, \u201cI’m so glad he’s OK.\u201d<\/p>\n
AP: Did Salman let you look at \u201cKnife\u201d while he was working on it? Did you let him see early drafts of \u201cThe Flower Bearers\u201d?<\/h2>\n
GRIFFITHS: I did see a lot of \u201cKnife\u201d as he was going through the process of it. And I do think there were subjects in it that we discussed, how to approach them, especially if they involved other people. So in \u201cKnife,\u201d there\u2019s the wedding, getting married. We decided because I was going to write \u201cThe Flower Bearers\u201d that all of the details, all of the things that happened on the wedding day belonged to \u201cThe Flower Bearers.\u201d<\/p>\n
I\u2019m more reticent to share things until I\u2019ve really gotten a grip on myself. So I had to get through quite a bit of \u201cThe Flower Bearers\u201d before I offered it to him to look at.<\/p>\n
AP: What did he say?<\/h2>\n
GRIFFITHS: He was deeply moved.<\/p>\n
AP: There’s the old expression about writing to learn what you think. Did writing this book help you shape in your mind what happened? If you had the chance, what would you have told yourself, the person you were, 10 years ago?<\/h2>\n
GRIFFITHS: It would have been a very short conversation, because, it would have been like, \u201cNo way,\u201d or \u201cShut up.\u201d<\/p>\n
I feel as I\u2019ve come through writing this book that there were moments where parts of that younger writer were really stripped away from me and taken away from me, and there\u2019s a kind of death of the self that happens when you are in deep shock and trauma and grief. There is a way when my friend Aisha was alive that I used to laugh or do certain things or hear certain songs that\u2019s gone. It\u2019s just in the book now. I don’t stay up and talk on the phone all night anymore the way I used to stay up and talk on the phone with her. I listen to Stevie Wonder differently now that she\u2019s not here. I think I was a different woman on Aug. 11 then who I had to become on Aug. 12.<\/p>\n
AP: Now that you\u2019ve written this book, are other things starting to come into your head, like poetry? Has a path been cleared?<\/h2>\n
GRIFFITHS: I definitely feel the path has opened up for me for poetry, for visual art. I feel as if I might want a break from language for a bit and plant myself a little bit more into my photography.<\/p>\n
AP: You have a line from your (2020) collection \u201cSeeing the Body,\u201d in which you write, \u201cForgive my estranged affair with the present.\u201d What\u2019s your relationship with the present now?<\/h2>\n
GRIFFITHS: It\u2019s not estranged now.<\/p>\n
AP: It’s reconciled?<\/h2>\n
GRIFFITHS: It\u2019s reconciled. It\u2019s realigned. It’s immediate and it\u2019s joyous. It\u2019s joyous because I now know how easily I could not be here, how easily Salman could not be here.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.wfmz.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 After her best friend died on the day Rachel Eliza Griffiths married Salman Rushdie and her husband was nearly stabbed to death a year later, the author and multimedia artist was left with no choice over what she would write about next. \u201cI think there was a struggle when I tried […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2240892,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[309367,21741,396586,309361,433626],"class_list":["post-2240891","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-books-and-literature","tag-entertainment","tag-nonfiction","tag-poetry","tag-rachel-eliza-griffiths-memoir-salman-rushdie"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/The-pain-and-joy-of-Rachel-Eliza-Griffiths-writing-journey.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2240891","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2240891"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2240891\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2240893,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2240891\/revisions\/2240893"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2240892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2240891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2240891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2240891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}