Writer Rachel Eliza Griffiths: ‘There’s a strength you don’t realise you have access to’

Rachel 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. 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. 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.

And it is she who looks like the celebrity. 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. Her cream suit is so immaculately tailored, it is tempting to talk clothes with her. 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”. But such frivolity is not on our agenda.

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. Eliza grew up in Washington DC and Wilmington, Delaware, the eldest of four children. Through most of her childhood, her mother was unwell with renal failure. She thinks this made her an unusually “serious and sensitive” child. 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. 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. I’m glad to have inherited her ferocity.” And she gives a radiant smile. No ferocity this afternoon. And what fascinates is the disconnect between her outward calm and her gentle voice – and what she puts on the page.

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. She focuses on a family with a dying mother and the story is saturated in the suffering and racial violence of the time. 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”. Griffiths’s strength is that she is compassionate yet undeceived about the details of her characters’s lives and about the bigger picture. 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”. In particular, she despairs about the way in which gun crime has become normalised: “If I go into public places, I’m looking around, thinking: if I have to get out of here, how do I go?”

After what happened to Rushdie, the question is unlikely to go away. They met in 2016 at a PEN event. By then, Griffiths had already published five books of poetry and he “went and ordered all of them, right away”. From the start, she explains, they agreed that respect for each other’s work must be the cornerstone of their relationship. She had already written a draft of Promise, which she went on to revise during the pandemic (“a very intense process”) while Rushdie worked on his latest novel, Victory City. Did they swap notes? “We’d talk about our writing at the end of the day. He’s a wonderful reader and would say: ‘I’m happy to read’… and I’d say, ‘When you’re invited, you get to read…” Her tone is flirtatious, with a flash of steel.

It was in 1989 that the Iranian government issued the fatwa ordering Rushdie’s execution. For the past 20 years, he had led a courageously relaxed life in New York. On the morning of 12 August, 2022, he was talking in front of thousands at Chautauqua Institution in south-west New York state when a young man in black, armed with a knife, climbed up on stage and stabbed him repeatedly. “I was at home in New York,” Griffiths says, “It was a normal morning, I was having a coffee and was with the dog.” It was a friend who called her first, “sobbing and yelling into the phone. I was told he was going to die. And suddenly I looked down and scores of messages were popping up – where are you? – and we descended into nightmare. We ended up chartering a private plane with some family members and got to the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in Pennsylvania before sunset.”

In a recent interview in the New Yorker, Rushdie explained how, in the aftermath of the attack, Griffiths took charge: “She just took over everything, as well as having the emotional burden of my almost being killed.” She dealt with doctors, police, investigators… Where did she find the strength? “There’s a strength you don’t realise you have access to… for me, it wasn’t like: you’re going to be strong. I am strong. I told myself I’m capable of handling this the best I can – and it’s about him. He has to survive, that’s all I care about.”

Rushdie has lost the sight in his right eye, and has damage to his liver and the nerves of his left hand. When I ask how he is doing, she is careful. She says he is “coming through” and adds, “he is himself”. She explains: “I feel relieved he does not have access to the memories I do. I’m holding those as best I can and trying to come forward, we are both trying to come forward. I don’t delude myself things are normal or can be normal again. I am completely changed, but don’t try to qualify that as good or bad. Perhaps, in some years, I will be able to see or narrate more of it, but I’m still in the immediacy of it.”

Their challenge is to make peace with what cannot be reversed: “You have to accept and surrender to things and not lose track of what’s possible. You have defiantly to hold on to a sense of wonder, to allow yourself to love the world in spite of its violence.” And as she is speaking, a line from her novel suddenly comes back to me. We talk about it together and she confirms that it is not only the key to her novel but her design for living: “This world promises us harm, and there is nothing you can do about it, except to have the nerve to love your life.”

• Promise by Rachel Eliza Griffiths is published by John Murray (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply