Genre: Memoir
My Review - 5 Stars
CW: cancer, dying
The Bright Hour is often mentioned in tandem with Paul Kalanithi’s wonderful memoir When Breath Becomes Air. Both books explore living with and dying from cancer. Kalanithi does so from the vantage point of a neurosurgeon. Nina Riggs does so as a wife and mother (and great-great-granddaughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson.) Her perspective is more philosophical, really digging into the small moments and big questions that add up to a life. There were a few too many Montaigne and Ralph Waldo Emerson references for my personal taste but I did like that their work served as a springboard for Riggs as she processed the ups and downs of treatment and what this meant for her loved ones. On top of her breast cancer diagnosis, she was dealing with her mom’s worsening health due to her own breast cancer treatment and then her eventual death as well. To grieve the death of a parent as you’re dealing with the same cancer that killed them feels near impossible and I so appreciated her insights into her grieving process.
This book was filled with the kind of writing that made me despair over ever writing a comparatively good sentence ever again. (The metaphor about the couch!!!) It’s moving and beautiful and heartbreaking. Her death was such a loss. (I should note it was interesting to read this knowing Riggs’s husband is now together with Kalanithi’s wife.) The former hospice social worker in me can’t help but hope it will inspire more people to have the hard conversations now about their future medical care. And the current me is so grateful I got to read her story.
For people who care about such things: it’s written in first-person present tense but I didn’t notice until three-quarters of the way through. I don’t think I’ve read many memoirs written in first-person present and before this, I wasn’t sure if it would work. Rest assured, it worked here. The immediacy served the story well.
CW: breast cancer, death of a loved one, grief
Synopsis
An exquisite memoir about how to live--and love--every day with "death in the room," from poet Nina Riggs, mother of two young sons and the direct descendant of Ralph Waldo Emerson, in the tradition of When Breath Becomes Air.
"We are breathless, but we love the days. They are promises. They are the only way to walk from one night to the other."
Nina Riggs was just thirty-seven years old when initially diagnosed with breast cancer--one small spot. Within a year, the mother of two sons, ages seven and nine, and married sixteen years to her best friend, received the devastating news that her cancer was terminal.
How does one live each day, "unattached to outcome"? How does one approach the moments, big and small, with both love and honesty?
Exploring motherhood, marriage, friendship, and memory, even as she wrestles with the legacy of her great-great-great grandfather, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nina Riggs's breathtaking memoir continues the urgent conversation that Paul Kalanithi began in his gorgeous When Breath Becomes Air. She asks, what makes a meaningful life when one has limited time?
Brilliantly written, disarmingly funny, and deeply moving, The Bright Hour is about how to love all the days, even the bad ones, and it's about the way literature, especially Emerson, and Nina's other muse, Montaigne, can be a balm and a form of prayer. It's a book about looking death squarely in the face and saying "this is what will be."
Especially poignant in these uncertain times, The Bright Hour urges us to live well and not lose sight of what makes us human: love, art, music, words.
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