About This Book
Nina Riggs was thirty-seven, a mother of two young boys, when a breast cancer diagnosis that seemed manageable became something else entirely. The Bright Hour is the book she wrote while facing that reality — not as a record of illness, but as an act of close attention to what ordinary life contains when you can no longer take it for granted. It asks the hardest questions about parenthood, marriage, and mortality without flinching, and somehow manages to feel less like a farewell than a fierce argument for being present.
Riggs was a poet, and it shows. The sentences are precise and surprising, never reaching for comfort when honesty serves better. She draws on her ancestor Ralph Waldo Emerson and on Montaigne — not as intellectual decoration, but because they genuinely help her think — weaving philosophy into the dailiness of school pickups and doctor's offices. The result is a memoir that reads in fragments of lived time, each chapter brief and fully inhabited. Her wit keeps the grief from curdling into sentimentality, and her clarity of observation makes even small moments feel earned and permanent.