Poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths On Love, Tragedy & ‘Survivor Mode’
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. 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.
What traumatic event overshadowed Rachel Eliza Griffiths' wedding day?
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.
How did the death of her best friend impact Griffiths' mental health?
Rachel Eliza Griffiths is also the author of the novel Promise and several poetry collections, including Seeing the Body. Rachel Eliza Griffiths, welcome to Fresh Air. I really like your book a lot. Thank you so much, Terri. And I'm going to call you Eliza from here on in because that's how you prefer to be called. So let's start with your wedding day, which you describe as both the best and worst day of your life. Best because you were getting married to a man you really loved and who loved you too. And worst because of your dearest friend's disappearance and death. How far were you into the wedding when you found out that she was dead?
What is Dissociative Identity Disorder and how does it affect Griffiths?
I did not find out, and I remember it quite clearly, until just after the formal wedding portraits had been done. And so I was in this wonderful state of having just gotten married and this kind of golden light at the end of a September day. And I started to notice that there just seemed to be a shadow on things. And the people, my loved ones who were there, their voices and manners had changed. And I'm there in my wedding dress. I've just gotten married and something, this kind of storm or coldness kind of swept over things. And I wanted to go back to my hotel suite. My phone was missing. I wanted to check on my friend to see if she was okay. I'd been told she'd had COVID and that was why she wasn't coming.
Later on, of course, Terry, I realized that My friends and family were just all working really hard to protect myself and my husband and that joy on that day. But the minute I got back to the hotel in an effort to locate my phone, I suddenly was able to see messages that then that's how I learned about what had happened.
You have dissociative identity disorder, and that kind of kicked in on your wedding day. Could you describe what that is, what the disorder is?
How did Griffiths manage the crisis after Salman Rushdie's stabbing?
So dissociative identity disorder, some people call it DID. It's a kind of new term to describe a diagnosis of severe dissociation. Some people have more severe forms of it. I would put myself on a more kind of highly functional scale here. DID usually comes into play after experiences of severe childhood trauma, and I have learned and researched and tried to educate myself to help myself live with this diagnosis. What happened on my wedding day, I think, with my DID is that the level of dissociation that I experienced that day matches the kind of intense trauma and shock that my body went into, which means even now that many parts of my wedding day are are blacked out in my memory and are not available to me.
Every now and then, I might get a glimpse, or if I'm triggered, I will see some aspect of myself or that day. But it's very hard for me even to look at photographs or anything from my wedding day and feel connected to it in the way that I'm sitting here having this conversation with you.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:12
2
What traumatic event overshadowed Rachel Eliza Griffiths' wedding day?
0:12–1:25
3
How did the death of her best friend impact Griffiths' mental health?
1:25–2:10
4
What is Dissociative Identity Disorder and how does it affect Griffiths?
2:10–3:33
5
How did Griffiths manage the crisis after Salman Rushdie's stabbing?
3:33–5:16
6
What role did Griffiths play in her husband's recovery after the attack?
5:16–6:54
7
How did Griffiths' childhood experiences shape her perspective on caregiving?
6:54–12:36
8
What challenges did Griffiths face in expressing her authentic self as a poet?
12:36–44:27
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Fresh Air
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