The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

Nina Riggs (Memoir, Simon & Schuster) “These days are days. We choose how to hold them.” Poet Nina Riggs was 37 when diagnosed with breast cancer — a “small spot” that would eventually take her life at the age of 39. A direct descendant of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Riggs narrates her days, reads essays by the French philosopher Montaigne, mothers her boys, loves her husband and takes Montaigne’s advice to heart when he wrote, “Let us make good use of our time.” Her observations about cancer are frank and unsentimental: “All the warfare jargon around cancer — the battling, the surviving, the winning/losing, the kickingki itsit ass — hasn’t been ringing true for me,” she writes. “But I’m good with not letting it crack me.” They are also tart and hilarious — she writes about nipple tattoos after her single mastectomy and the breast- shaped cloth insert she takes to calling “the pink critter.” She and a fellow cancer patient friend joke about the “casserole bitches” who show up with food. Her observations about her sons are wrenching, as she begins to realize that the treatment is not working. “I will never travel with my nearly grown sons through Italy,” she writes. “Let’s just say that.” RiggsR finished her manuscript in January 2017; she died a month later. Like the bestselling “When Breath Becomes Air,” the work she left behind is a beautiful testament to the magic ofo everyday life and making the most of the time we are given, whether it’s spent taking last-minute trips to Paris, wallpaperingi theth mudroom or reveling in a newly purchased couch. “These are the things we all say at the end of book club now: I love you,” she writes. “Of course we do. Why haven’t we been saying that all along?”