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In September 2016 The New York Times ran a Modern Love essay by Nina Riggs, a poet in Greensboro, North Carolina, about shopping for a living-room couch after learning that her breast cancer would not be cured. She was 39 when she died, on 26 February 2017. Her memoir, The Bright Hour, came out that June, with a short epilogue by her husband, John Duberstein, and became a New York Times bestseller. Before it there was one small book of poems, published in 2009. This guide covers her two key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 2 key books · 2009–2017 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Nina Riggs published two books: the poetry collection Lucky, Lucky (2009) and The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying (2017), written while she was dying of metastatic breast cancer and published four months after her death. Start with The Bright Hour; it is the book she is known for, and the one most readers will find in a shop or library.
Where to Start with Nina Riggs
If you want her defining book
→ The Bright Hour (2017) — the memoir of her last two years, with her two young sons and her dying mother.
If you want a book about living with a terminal diagnosis
→ The Bright Hour (2017) — often read alongside Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air.
If you want her poetry
→ Lucky, Lucky (2009) — her only collection, from the years before her illness.
2 Nina Riggs Books, in Order
Lucky, Lucky
Her only collection of poems, published by Finishing Line Press in 2009, five years after she finished her MFA in poetry at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. It appeared well before her cancer diagnosis and is a small-press paperback, much harder to find than her memoir.
The Bright Hour
Riggs was 37, with two young sons, when a biopsy found “one small spot” of breast cancer; within a year it had spread and was incurable. The memoir, in four parts named Stage One to Stage Four, follows her treatment alongside the last illness of her mother, Jan, who had multiple myeloma, and leans throughout on Montaigne and on her ancestor Ralph Waldo Emerson. Published by Simon & Schuster in June 2017, four months after her death, it became a New York Times bestseller and was nominated for the 2017 Goodreads Choice Award in Memoir & Autobiography.
In What Order to Read Nina Riggs
The two books are not connected, and most readers come to Riggs through The Bright Hour alone. Reading the memoir first is the natural way in; it explains who she was, a poet with an MFA, a mother of two and a great-great-great-granddaughter of Emerson, and it is the book still widely in print.
If the memoir leaves you wanting more of her voice, there is also her Modern Love essay, “When a Couch Is More Than a Couch” (2016), and her poems in Lucky, Lucky, which show the compression she brought to the short chapters of the memoir.
A reading path
1. The Bright Hour (2017)
2. “When a Couch Is More Than a Couch” (Modern Love essay, 2016)
3. Lucky, Lucky (2009)
The years · 1977–2017
Quick facts about Nina Riggs
- Known for
- The Bright Hour, a frank and often funny memoir of living with terminal breast cancer as a young mother, published four months after her death at 39
- 1977
- Born in San Francisco
- 2004
- MFA in poetry, UNC Greensboro
- 2009
- Lucky, Lucky, her poetry collection
- 2017
- Dies in February; The Bright Hour published in June
- Born
- 29 March 1977, San Francisco, California
- Died
- 26 February 2017, Greensboro, North Carolina, aged 39
- Education
- BA in creative writing, UNC Chapel Hill; MFA in poetry, UNC Greensboro (2004)
- Family
- Married to the lawyer John Duberstein; two sons
- Ancestry
- Great-great-great-granddaughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Blog
- Suspicious Country, about living with metastatic breast cancer
The red mark is 2017: the year she died and The Bright Hour was published.
How Nina Riggs Writes: A Poet’s Memoir
Riggs trained as a poet, and The Bright Hour is built like a poet’s book: four parts named after the stages of cancer, made of short scenes from family life rather than a single argument. It grew out of her blog, Suspicious Country, which she kept after her diagnosis. The opening is plain and exact: a phone call while her husband is away at a conference, and a doctor saying “one small spot”.
She reads her way through illness. Montaigne, who argued for living with death in mind, is quoted throughout, and so is Emerson, her great-great-great-grandfather on her father’s side; the title comes from an Emerson journal entry about ceasing “for a bright hour to be a prisoner of this sickly body”. She also borrows from James Joyce’s “The Dead” to describe her hair falling out during chemotherapy.
What reviewers noticed most was the humour. Publishers Weekly called the book funny despite its sadness, and reviewers often compare it to Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air as the lighter, less philosophical of the two. Much of the book is about other people: her husband John, her sons Freddy and Benny, her father, and her mother, who is dying at the same time she is.
Frequently asked questions about Nina Riggs’s books
How many books has Nina Riggs written?
Two: the poetry collection Lucky, Lucky (2009) and the memoir The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying (2017). She also wrote essays for The New York Times and The Washington Post and a blog, Suspicious Country.
What are Nina Riggs’s books in order?
Lucky, Lucky (2009), then The Bright Hour (2017).
Where should I start with Nina Riggs?
With The Bright Hour. It is her best-known book and the one that is easy to find; her poetry collection was a small-press edition.
What is Nina Riggs’s most famous book?
The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying, published by Simon & Schuster in June 2017. It was a New York Times bestseller and was named a best book of 2017 by outlets including The Washington Post and NPR.
Is Nina Riggs still alive?
No. She died of metastatic breast cancer on 26 February 2017, aged 39, four months before The Bright Hour was published. Her husband, John Duberstein, wrote its short epilogue.
Is Nina Riggs related to Ralph Waldo Emerson?
Yes. She was his great-great-great-granddaughter, on her father’s side, and she quotes him throughout The Bright Hour.
Where does the title The Bright Hour come from?
From a journal entry by Emerson: “That is morning; to cease for a bright hour to be a prisoner of this sickly body”.
What is the connection between Nina Riggs and Paul Kalanithi?
Their memoirs are often compared, since both were written by young parents dying of cancer. After Riggs’s death, her husband John Duberstein contacted Lucy Kalanithi, Paul Kalanithi’s widow, as Nina had suggested he do; the two later became a couple.
What was Nina Riggs’s Modern Love essay about?
“When a Couch Is More Than a Couch”, published in The New York Times on 23 September 2016, is about her search for a living-room couch after her cancer became terminal. In 2018 Kate Winslet read it for the Modern Love podcast.
Did The Bright Hour win any awards?
It was nominated for the 2017 Goodreads Choice Award in Memoir & Autobiography and received starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly and Library Journal, but it did not win a major literary prize.
Footnotes
- Nina Riggs — Wikipedia
- The Bright Hour — Simon & Schuster
- A young mother’s unsentimental memoir of her last days — The Boston Globe, 2017
- The Bright Hour — Publishers Weekly review, 2017
- When a Couch Is More Than a Couch — WBUR Modern Love, 2018
- Lucky, Lucky — Finishing Line Press
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“The call comes when John is away at a conference in New Orleans.”
— Nina Riggs, The Bright Hour (2017), the opening of the book
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