After \u200bthe writer was stabbed in a horrific attack, his wife started making a video diary of his recovery. The clips are featured in a new film from Alex Gibney, who drew on Dennis Potter to create a powerful portrait of Rushdie\u2019s tumultuous life<\/p>\n\n
Eliza Griffiths was at home in New York, drinking a second cup of coffee one August morning in 2022, when her phone rang. She answered it to a frantic friend, who told her the man she had married just a year earlier, and who had set off the previous night for a speaking engagement nearly 400 miles away, had been hurt. \u201cWhat kind of hurt?\u201d she panicked. Turning on the television, she was assaulted by blurry images of chaos on stage as audience members surged to the rescue. Her husband, Sir Salman Rushdie, had been stabbed multiple times and was fighting for his life.<\/p>\n
Within days of desperately chartering a plane to fly her to Rushdie\u2019s hospital bedside, not knowing if he was alive or dead, Griffiths \u2013 a poet and photographer who works under her full name Rachel Eliza Griffiths \u2013 had begun to make a video diary recording his treatment and recovery. \u201cWhen it had become likely that I was going to survive,\u201d says Rushdie drily, \u201cI\u00a0said to Eliza we need to make a\u00a0record of this. By which I meant something very modest: maybe she would take a picture of me on her iPhone every couple of days just to document the recovery, but Eliza had bigger ideas.\u201d<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/74e3d1d7529c31667e560fd0f26373357c5ac35d\/1057_0_6147_4918\/master\/6147.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=2306a717bc141c4d3ae41edb02af7953\" "\\"\u2018The")
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