The Bright Hour

I got this book based on reviews I read. There was the added fact that Nina Riggs is a descendant of Ralph Waldo Emerson and she lived near me. I thought the book was to philosophic in the first few chapters. But the more I read, the more engrossed I got in her life and how she was living it and accepting of an early death. The whole family was unusual. Her two young boys seemed wiser than their years. The extended family unit learned to laugh in the face of adversity and to live for each day. I loved this book.

This memoir was written by Nina during the years before she died from cancer. She writes about fighting the cancer, about losing her mom to cancer during her own fight, and about navigating life as a sick person. While this book was really good, it was hard to read, because it was just very sad. It was hard reading about her decline, knowing that she died before the book came out. Riggs was an artist, and a lot of the chapters in her book are really artistically written. I had to go back a couple of times and reread several of the paragraphs to really understand them and soak them in. Overall it's really deep and very, very good – you just have to be in the right space to read it.

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