de Nina Riggs
"Stunning...heartrending...this year's When Breath Becomes Air." —Nora Krug, The Washington Post
"Beautiful and haunting." —Matt McCarthy, MD, USA TODAY
"Deeply affecting...simultaneously heartbreaking and funny." —People (Book of the Week)
"Vivid, immediate." —Laura Collins-Hughes, The Boston Globe
Starred reviews from * Kirkus Reviews * Publishers Weekly * Library Journal *
Best Books of 2017 Selection by * The Washington Post *
Most Anticipated Summer Reading Selection by * The Washington Post * Entertainment Weekly * Glamour * The Seattle Times * Vulture * InStyle * Bookpage * Bookriot * Real Simple * The Atlanta Journal-Constitution *
The New York Times bestseller by poet Nina Riggs, mother of two young sons and the direct descendant of Ralph Waldo Emerson, is "a stunning...heart-rending meditation on life...It is this year's When Breath Becomes Air" (The Washington Post).
We are breathless but we love the days. They are promises. They are the only way to walk from one night to the other.
Poet and essayist Nina Riggs was just thirty-seven years old when initially diagnosed with breast cancer—one small spot. Within a year, she received the devastating news that her cancer was terminal.
How does a dying person learn to live each day "unattached to outcome"? How does one approach the moments, big and small, with both love and honesty? How does a young mother and wife prepare her two young children and adored husband for a loss that will shape the rest of their lives? How do we want to be remembered?
Exploring motherhood, marriage, friendship, and memory, Nina asks: What makes a meaningful life when one has limited time? "Profound and poignant" (O, The Oprah Magazine), The Bright Hour is about how to make the most of all the days, even the painful ones. It's about the way literature, especially Nina's direct ancestor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and her other muse, Montaigne, can be a balm and a form of prayer.
Brilliantly written and exceptionally moving, it's a "deeply affecting memoir, a simultaneously heartbreaking and funny account of living with loss and the specter of death. As Riggs lyrically, unflinchingly details her reality, she finds beauty and truth that comfort even amid the crushing sadness" (People, Book of the Week).
Tender and heartwarming, The Bright Hour "is a gentle reminder to cherish each day" (Entertainment Weekly, Best New Books) and offers us this important perspective: "You can read a multitude books about how to die, but Riggs, a dying woman, will show you how to live" (The New York Times Book Review, Editor's Choice).
"Stunning...heartrending...this year's When Breath Becomes Air." —Nora Krug, The Washington Post
"Beautiful and haunting." —Matt McCarthy, MD, USA TODAY
"Deeply affecting...simultaneously heartbreaking and funny." —People (Book of the Week)
"Vivid, immediate." —Laura Collins-Hughes, The Boston Globe
Starred reviews from * Kirkus Reviews * Publishers Weekly * Library Journal *
Best Books of 2017 Selection by * The Washington Post *
Most Anticipated Summer Reading Selection by * The Washington Post * Entertainment Weekly * Glamour * The Seattle Times * Vulture * InStyle * Bookpage * Bookriot * Real Simple * The Atlanta Journal-Constitution *
The New York Times bestseller by poet Nina Riggs, mother of two young sons and the direct descendant of Ralph Waldo Emerson, is "a stunning...heart-rending meditation on life...It is this year's When Breath Becomes Air" (The Washington Post).
We are breathless but we love the days. They are promises. They are the only way to walk from one night to the other.
Poet and essayist Nina Riggs was just thirty-seven years old when initially diagnosed with breast cancer—one small spot. Within a year, she received the devastating news that her cancer was terminal.
How does a dying person learn to live each day "unattached to outcome"? How does one approach the moments, big and small, with both love and honesty? How does a young mother and wife prepare her two young children and adored husband for a loss that will shape the rest of their lives? How do we want to be remembered?
Exploring motherhood, marriage, friendship, and memory, Nina asks: What makes a meaningful life when one has limited time? "Profound and poignant" (O, The Oprah Magazine), The Bright Hour is about how to make the most of all the days, even the painful ones. It's about the way literature, especially Nina's direct ancestor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and her other muse, Montaigne, can be a balm and a form of prayer.
Brilliantly written and exceptionally moving, it's a "deeply affecting memoir, a simultaneously heartbreaking and funny account of living with loss and the specter of death. As Riggs lyrically, unflinchingly details her reality, she finds beauty and truth that comfort even amid the crushing sadness" (People, Book of the Week).
Tender and heartwarming, The Bright Hour "is a gentle reminder to cherish each day" (Entertainment Weekly, Best New Books) and offers us this important perspective: "You can read a multitude books about how to die, but Riggs, a dying woman, will show you how to live" (The New York Times Book Review, Editor's Choice).
Critiques-
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THE BRIGHT HOUR is a thing of beauty. Nina Riggs is honest and profoundly human as she comes to terms with life with terminal cancer and death. Narrator Cassandra Campbell is just perfect. She matches Riggs's emotions at every stage, and her lovely smooth voice has a bittersweet quality. The memoir manages to be both entertaining and heartbreaking as Riggs considers her family medical history (about the worst lottery ticket ever), loses her mother to multiple myeloma, reminisces about meeting her husband in a graveyard, and endures brutal treatments that bring no cure. She is funny, too--she can't seem to decide which couch to buy, her widowed father starts riding a motorcycle, and she plans post-death emails to her sons if they ever view pornography on the internet. The short afterword from Riggs's husband is narrated by Kirby Heyborne. It feels like losing a beautiful friend when it's over. A.B. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
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September 15, 2017
Riggs died February 26, 2017. Cassandra Campbell gently narrates most of the work, until Kirby Heyborne takes over to read the afterword by Riggs's husband, John, and shatters your heart. For a book about fatal diseases--Riggs was diagnosed at 37 with breast cancer; her mother with multiple myeloma, from which she died just months before her daughter--this memoir is bright with joy, laughter, and enveloping love. The mother of two young sons and wife to John, whom she met in a graveyard joking about Kant and Kierkegaard during a college summer job, Riggs never loses sight of what inspires and nurtures her, even as her "days are filled with imagining how to wind things down." Riggs finds calming balm in the writings of her great-great-great-grandfather Ralph Waldo Emerson, twinned with 16th-century philosopher Michel de Montaigne's meditations. Her ruminations about her diagnosis, treatments, and losses are unblinkingly honest with pain and frustration, but grace and courage somehow prevail. VERDICT Readers who were moved by Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air, Will Schwalbe's The End of Your Life Book Club, or Jeffrey Zaslow's The Last Lecture will find exquisite solace in this Bright Hour. ["Whether confronting disease or not, everyone should read this beautifully crafted book as it imbues life and loved ones with a particularly transcendent glow": LJ 4/1/17 starred review of the S. & S. hc.]--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC
Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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Starred review from April 24, 2017
Riggs, who lives in Greensboro, N.C., was 38 when she was diagnosed with incurable metastatic breast cancer. The diagnosis comes at the onset of this moving and insightful memoir. Married to a lawyer, and the mother of two young sons, Riggs was initially told that the cancer was “one small spot,” but as the memoir progresses (the sections are ominously yet cleverly named after the four “stages” of cancer), the small spot grows and spreads to her spine. She undergoes a mastectomy, chemotherapy, radiation, spinal surgery, and joins a clinical trial. During the same period, Riggs’s wisecracking and beloved mother, who had been fighting multiple myeloma for eight years, dies. Despite the profound sadness of her situation, Riggs writes with humor; the memoir is rife with witty one-liners and musings on the joys and challenges of mothering and observations on the importance of loving relationships. The great-great-great-granddaughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Riggs frequently quotes her legendary relative and uses his writings as a guide, as well as the writings of the philosopher Montaigne, whose advice to “live with an awareness of death in the room” she takes seriously. 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.”
