Abstract
By the time Nina Riggs had a contract with a publisher for The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying, she also knew that her cancer was not survivable. When confronted with her own mortality, Riggs chose to write. Her book is an illness memoir, but it is also something more. By reading Riggs’ work through the framework of bearing witness—of telling the truth in the face of traumatic events and experiences—we can see how this practice becomes a spiritual one that allows Riggs to reconcile her pre-cancer self to her dying self, creating a pathway to hope as she normalizes for herself (and maybe even for her readers) death’s presence in the midst of life.