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.
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.”