Unveiling Hidden Worlds: How Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ The Flower Bearers Transforms Grief Into Art
But New York can be a harsh place to live on a writer’s salary and her struggle to succeed and subsist messes with Griffiths’ mental health. In one harrowing chapter, Griffiths describes how a call for help to a suicide hotline leads to her being brutally handcuffed in her own apartment and then taken to an ER against her will. Through all of this, self-loathing is the narrator’s constant companion.
Griffiths creates a quiet dialogue between herself and the reader about how she feels estranged from a deep sense of self and is afraid to be herself for fear of being abandoned by her parents, Aisha and others who might conclude her work is trivial or her personality is “too much.” In the process she works and succeeds at seeing her loved ones fully and fairly.
