![]() ![]() She emphasises that her subject has not dated and is tormented by the inescapable truth that the US is “on the frontline dealing with racial violence”. Griffiths’s strength is that she is compassionate yet undeceived about the details of her characters’s lives and about the bigger picture. It was her father, Norman Dwight Griffiths, an environmental lawyer, who gave her a sense of the importance of “seeing yourself as a citizen of the world”. She focuses on a family with a dying mother and the story is saturated in the suffering and racial violence of the time. Promise is set in 1957, at the beginning of the civil rights movement, in New England rather than in the more predictable south, and it is this distance that brings Griffiths close to her subject. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.Īfter newsletter promotion We’d talk about our writing at the end of the day. For more information see our Privacy Policy. Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. ![]() And what fascinates is the disconnect between her outward calm and her gentle voice – and what she puts on the page. ![]() I’m glad to have inherited her ferocity.” And she gives a radiant smile. Griffiths told herself: “You’d better not hide behind your mother’s shadow any more, you’d better open your mouth and say what you need and what you don’t need.” She explains: “My mother was very ferocious. Her mother once told her: “You’re hiding, pretending not to know the things you know.” It was only after her mother’s death that the hiding turned to seeking. She thinks this made her an unusually “serious and sensitive” child. Through most of her childhood, her mother was unwell with renal failure. Eliza grew up in Washington DC and Wilmington, Delaware, the eldest of four children. ![]() I will have to ask her – as how could it be avoided – about the attempt on Rushdie’s life, but want to know, before that, about the figure who inspired the novel and the poems: her mother, Michele Antoinette Pray-Griffiths. I know she is interested because of one of her poems, which refers to Calvin Klein and in which she describes attending Maya Angelou’s funeral and her hilarious attempts to disguise, during the service, the busting of her zip on a “good black dress with its snakeskin panel down the front”. Her cream suit is so immaculately tailored, it is tempting to talk clothes with her. At 44, she has standout glamour and if she feels jet-lagged after her recent flight from New York to London (where Rushdie has had a date at Windsor Castle – he was made a companion of honour by Princess Anne), she shows no sign of it. But even before meeting her, the intensity, fluency and scope of her novel and of her award-winning collection of poetry Seeing the Body – illustrated by her own photographs – hints at a formidable independence.Īnd it is she who looks like the celebrity. Lady Rushdie, known as Eliza, is Salman Rushdie’s fifth wife and is understandably mindful of the risk that she might find herself defined by her marriage or that her own achievements might get sidelined – Rushdie is, after all, a literary celebrity on a scale against which most first-time novelists would not wish to compete. R achel Eliza Griffiths arrives at the Observer’s offices and I tell her at once, as I greet her, that I recognise her from the striking publicity photo at the back of the proof copy of her debut novel Promise – our reason for meeting. ![]()
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