Bright Hour (Riggs) - Book Reviews

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