A New York Times Bestseller: 'You can read a multitude of books about how to die, but Riggs, a dying woman, will show you how to live.'
Most Anticipated Summer Reading Selection by * The Washington Post * Glamour * The Seattle Times * Real Simple * The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In 2015 poet and writer Nina Riggs was diagnosed with breast cancer, and it metastasised later that year. She was thirty-eight years old, married to the love of her life and the mother of two small boys; her mother had died only a few months earlier from multiple myeloma.
The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying is Nina's intimate, unflinching account of 'living with death in the room'. She tells her story in a series of absurd, poignant and often hilarious vignettes drawn from a life that has 'no real future or arc left to it, yet still goes on as if it does'.
This unforgettable memoir leads the reader into the innermost chambers of the writer's life: into the mind and heart, the work and home and family, of a young woman alternately seeking to make peace with and raging against the reality of her approaching death.
Nina Riggs received her MFA in poetry in 2004 and published a book of poems, Lucky, Lucky, in 2009. She wrote about life with metastatic breast cancer on her blog, Suspicious Country; her recent work appeared in the Washington Post and the New York Times. She lived with her husband and sons and dogs in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Starred reviews from * Kirkus Reviews * Publishers Weekly * Library Journal *
REVIEWS FOR THE BRIGHT HOUR BY NINA RIGGS
'Profound and poignant...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."' O Magazine
'Stunning...heartrending...this year's When Breath Becomes Air.' The Washington Post
'Often funny and absurd, The Bright Hour is about sitting with your own mortality, and the idea of your life coming to an end always being in the room with you...Nina reminds us not to waste time under the covers and instead get out there and make the most of it.' Frankie
'Gorgeous and brave, Nina Riggs's memoir explodes with life and insight even amid ruin—with lines so poetic they knocked the wind out of me. It's heartbreaking, funny, clear-eyed, and entirely devoid of cliché. This book is her hard-won treasure, and ours.' Dr Lucy Kalanithi, author of When Breath Becomes Air
"Beautiful and haunting." Matt McCarthy, USA Today
"Deeply affecting...simultaneously heartbreaking and funny." People, (Book of the Week)
"Vivid, immediate." Laura Collins-Hughes, The Boston Globe
'How a woman can have this much emotional clarity and narrative power while fighting for her life should astonish every last one of us. Magical. Unforgettable.' Kelly Corrigan
'A luminous, heartbreaking symphony of wit, wisdom, pain, parenting and perseverance against insurmountable odds.' Starred Review, Kirkus Reviews
'A moving reminder of the precious gift of life.' Mindfood
'The Bright Hour is, as the subtitle indicates, an account of life and death, but it's the living that shines, in this gloriously irreverent, sometimes objective account of the author's terminal cancer.' Good Reading
'[A] deeply moving (and often funny) memoir.' Marie Claire
'Incredibly...
