Terry Gross

In her debut novel, The White Hot, a mother abandons her 10-year-old daughter, then writes her a letter on her 18th birthday to explain.

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The day that writer Rachel Eliza Griffith married writer Salman Rushdie was expected to be one of the best, perhaps the best, day of her life.

But her dearest friend Aisha, who was set to speak at the wedding, never arrived because she suddenly, shockingly, died.

That triggered Griffith's dissociative identity disorder.

She'll explain what that means a little later.

It was only 11 months after the wedding that Rushdie was stabbed multiple times while being interviewed on stage at the Chautauqua Festival near Buffalo, New York.

Griffiths was home in New York City at the time and had to figure out how to get to her husband, not knowing whether she'd find him still alive, what their future would be, what her future would be.

When she got to the ICU, he was hanging on to his life.

His face was so disfigured from the wounds, the stab that blinded him, and the swelling that she refused to allow him to look in a mirror.

Griffith's new memoir, The Flower Bearers, covers this period as well as her childhood, which pretty much ended when she was 11 or 12 and her mother was diagnosed with kidney disease.

She also writes about her relationship with Aisha and how they initially connected over being black female poets, trying to find their voices as writers and a place in the literary world.

Rachel Eliza Griffiths is also the author of the novel Promise and several poetry collections, including Seeing the Body.