The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying
Nina Riggs, 2017
Simon & Schuster
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781501169359
Summary
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. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 29, 1977
• Raised—North of Boston, Massachusetts, USA
• Death—February 26, 2017
• Where—Greensboro, North Carolina
Nina Riggs was a poet, author, wife, and mother of two young sons, who died of breast cancer in 2017 at the age of 39. Her memoir The Bright Hour, about living and loving "with death in the room, was published several months after her death. The book was widely acclaimed for its inspiration, even humor, and became an bestseller.
Riggs traced her literary lineage back to Ralph Waldo Emerson, her great-great-great grandfather. As she told Nora Krug of the Washington Post:
His legacy hangs long over our family, and I grew up right near his old stomping grounds north of Boston. I was literally and figuratively raised in his shadow and, since I really wanted to be a writer from a young age, I guess I was bound to have to contend with his legacy. But I didn’t always have any sense of that. In fact, I came to an understanding of his writing only later in my life. For many years I didn’t even engage with Emerson directly. His portraits were around, and the family had first editions of Emerson’s work.
Riggs left Massachusetts for North Carolina where she earned her B.A. and her M.F.A. in poetry. in 2009 she published a book of poems, Lucky, Lucky.
Breast cancer was rife in her family, on both sides—she lost her mother nearly two years before her own death, and a great aunt was diagnosed in the 1970s. When Riggs herself was diagnosed, in 2015, she wrote about living with the disease on her blog, Suspicious Country. The memoir grew out of her blog.
Riggs' other work appeared in The Washington Post and New York Times. Riggs lived with her husband John Durbenstein, a lawyer, and their two young sons in Greensboro, North Carolina. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Knowing Nina Riggs died shortly after writing The Bright Hour…makes this moving and often very funny memoir almost unbearable to read. But that's because it is not one bromide after the other. It is true, and it might crush you…You can read a multitude of books about how to die, but Riggs, a dying woman, will show you how to live.
Judith Newman - New York Times Book Review
The Bright Hour is a stunning work, a heart-rending meditation on life—not just how to appreciate it while you’re living it, but how to embrace its end, too. It is this year’s When Breath Becomes Air.
Nora Krug - Washington Post
A vivid, immediate dispatch from the front lines of mortality and a record of a life by someone who wasn't done living yet. But there is nothing maudlin about it...her warm portraits of each of [the members of her closest circle] are a large part of the book's emotional power. So is something we don't notice fully until it's gone: the strength and clarity of Riggs's voice, which never faded on the page, and which we won't get to hear again.
Laura Collins-Hughes - Boston Globe
Like the bestselling When Breath Becomes Air, the work she left behind is a beautiful testament to the quiet magic of everyday life and making the most of the time we are given, whether it’s spent taking last-minute trips to Paris, wallpapering the mudroom, or reveling in a newly purchased couch. "These are the things we all say at the end of book club now: I love you," she writes. "Of course we do. Why haven’t we been saying that all along?"
New York Post
Beautiful and haunting…a thoughtful and heartbreaking exploration of what makes life meaningful in a person's remaining days...Buried within this agonizing tale are moments of levity—I laughed out loud many, many times—and flashes of poetry.… This book provides a stunning look at that experience and has forever changed my understanding of the illness narrative. It’s a book every doctor and patient should read…It's hard not to compare The Bright Hour to When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalanithi's best-selling memoir about his battle with lung cancer. Both were in their late 30s when they discovered they were dying, and both write spare prose with a poignancy that is uncommon. However, Riggs' book is markedly different in tone and content. It's more humorous and less philosophical — but equally moving.
USA Today - Matt McCarthy, MD,
Poet Nina Riggs was only 37, the mother of two young sons, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Within a year she had lost her mother to multiple myeloma—and learned her own cancer was terminal as well. Riggs died last February, leaving behind this deeply affecting memoir, a simultaneously heartbreaking and funny account of living with loss and the specter of death. As she lyrically, unflinchingly details her reality, she finds beauty and truth that comfort even amid the crushing sadness.
People
Profound and poignant...superb...I put down The Bright Hour a slightly different, and better, person—unbearably sad and also feeling, as Riggs did, "the hug of the world."
Kelly Corrigan - O Magazine
In this memoir, published posthumously, Nina Riggs asks: How do you make life meaningful when you know your time is limited? With humor and honesty, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying chronicles Riggs’s diagnosis of metastatic breast cancer and the moments shared with her school-age sons and her husband before her death at age 39.
Real Simple
(Starred review.) Riggs frequently quotes her legendary relative and uses his writings as a guide…. In this tender memoir Riggs displays a keen awareness of and reverence for all the moments of life—both the light, and the dark, “the cruel, and the beautiful.”
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Poet Riggs…reminds us that we are all in this world until we leave it; the gallows humor surrounding her mother's funeral will make readers howl guiltily but appreciatively.…beautifully crafted book as it imbues life and loved ones with a particularly transcendent glow. —Bette-Lee Fox, Library Journal
Library Journal
(Starred review.) A loving mother of two meditates on the nature of life and death.… Riggs' indefatigable spirit is the true heroine in this story of life and loss; even in her darkest moments, she writes, "the beautiful, vibrant, living world goes on." A luminous, heartbreaking symphony of wit, wisdom, pain, parenting, and perseverance against insurmountable odds.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for The Bright Hour … then take off on your own:
1. Nina Riggs has written a remarkable memoir—about a facing down a deadly disease—and done so with courageous and even, at times, humor. Find passages that strike you as particularly brave or inspirational or witty or sad. What passages stand out to you in terms of their sheer emotional power?
2. Riggs poses a question we all grapple with, but for her its answer was most urgent: what makes a meaningful life, particularly when that life is to be cut short? How does Riggs answer that question? How would you answer it?
3. The book's title comes from Ralph Waldo Emerson: "That is morning; to cease for a bright hour to be a prisoner of this sickly body, and to become as large as the World." What does the passage mean and what is its significance to the memoir?
4. Talk about how the death of Riggs' mother, Jan, affected her? Consider how painful it must have been for her mother to know she couldn't be there for Nina when she needed her.
5. After her surgery, Riggs' doctor dissuaded her from reconstructive surgery—"That's a survivor issue. We're not there yet." Was that a proper response on the doctor's part? How might you have felt had you received the answer: angry, fearful, or grateful for the honesty?
6. Talk about her husband's Epilogue and Acknowledgements. What does he reveal about himself in his writing and about his and Riggs' relationship?
7. Riggs wrote: "There are so many things that are worse than death: old grudges, a lack of self-awareness, severe constipation, no sense of humor, the grimace on your husband's face as he empties your surgical drain into the measuring cup." Do you agree that there are things worse than death? If so, what would you add to that list?
8. Overall, how did you experience The Bright Hour? Have you read Randy Pausche's The Last Lecture (2008) or Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air (2016)? If so, is Riggs' book similar to either one in tone and message?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)