The Bright Hour

Nina Riggs 2017

Devastation Rating

Existential Dread
memoir cancer death motherhood

Our Take

Riggs was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer and wrote this memoir of her last year alive. She quotes Montaigne, raises two boys, and refuses to make her death more meaningful than it is. She died in 2017, months after finishing it. The lightness of the prose is not denial — it is courage.

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