Susanna Moore, THE LOST WIFE: A Novel
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[1:03]Susanna Moore is the author of The Lost Wife, a novel.
[1:06]She grew up in the Hawaiian Islands, but has lived in New York for 40 years.
[1:10]Her first book, My Old Sweetheart, was published in 1982 and won the pen-heavy way prize
[1:15]for first fiction and a prize from the American Academy.
[1:19]In the cut was published in 1995 and was made into a film by Jane Campion.
[1:24]She has written two memoirs, including Miss Aliminem and Seven Novels.
[1:29]She teaches a seminar on myth and metaphor at Princeton University.
[1:32]Welcome, Susanna.
[1:33]Thank you so much for coming on Momstone.
[1:34]Have time to read books to discuss The Lost Wife, a novel.
[1:38]Thank you.
[1:39]Happy to be here.
[1:40]Thank you.
[1:41]Would you mind telling listeners what The Lost Wife is about?
[1:45]It is the story of a wife woman who is adopted during the Sue uprising of 1862 with her
[1:55]two children in Minnesota territory.
[2:00]And because she is sympathetic to Native Americans and has many friends within the plan,
[2:09]she is then rejected and vilified by her neighbors and even her husband once she is freed.
[2:17]Well, I feel like throughout The Novel, there is so much violence against women sort
[2:24]of scattered throughout whether it is the main character getting hurt in the beginning.
[2:30]Her mother having her bedsheets on fire after a man threw a lamp at her, which of course
[2:36]then were candles to the women who seemed to have lost their minds in the camp.
[2:41]You had a line that was really beautiful, something like, let me see if I can find it
[2:45]probably not because I can never find anything.
[2:47]But you said some of the women do not say a word.
[2:50]Others have lost their minds and can no longer tell the difference between what is real
[2:54]and what they imagine.
[2:56]Tell me a little bit about all of the violence against women, women's roles in society
[3:01]and sort of how you decided to delve into all of this.
[3:03]It is a big question.
[3:05]You can just talk for 20 minutes.
[3:06]That is fine.
[3:07]No, I do not want you to.
[3:11]You know, it is the theme in all of my books.
[3:14]It is less so in the early books which are about who I and my childhood growing up and
[3:19]very autobiographical, although it is in those books as well.
[3:25]And then of course in the cut is all about violence.
[3:30]I think what had happened and what stirred me to write in the cut was that I was teaching
[3:36]in prison as a volunteer and also working in shelter for women and children in New York
[3:44]as a volunteer.
[3:46]Not only did I see it first hand, but I began to read about it and to look at the statistics
[3:55]and the belief and I was shocked at the level and the amount of violence that is directed
[4:04]to women, particularly by men, they know.
[4:08]So that interested me and worried me and then the other books, I do not think there is
[4:16]a lot of violence in the Indian book or the German book, but certainly in this one,
[4:22]although it is not just directed to women, you know, it is the end of the book when the
[4:33]32 Native Americans are hanged, many of them who were innocent.
[4:44]And where did the fascination with the Sioux community come from?
[4:48]Well, during the pandemic, I read an awful lot anyway, maybe five or six hours a day.
[4:56]And during the pandemic, that was increased and I found myself reading captivity narratives
[5:04]of them written by women.
[5:06]I mean, of course there is.
[5:08]I wonder why.
[5:10]I will see my own captivity, but one, I'm hesitant to make as my own captivity was benign.
[5:18]Most of them written by women, many in the 17th and 18th century, mostly in the Northeast,
[5:27]many of them died, many of them were ransomed, some chose to stay with their captors,
[5:35]at children, married, lived happily.
[5:40]And when I came across Sarah Wakefield, she was a little different than the others.
[5:45]First of all, it was late.
[5:46]It was 19th century, 1862, and it was the West, which was unusual.
[5:54]And I also had read an article in the newspaper about the students at the Burley School
[6:01]here in New York, um, objecting to one of the narratives, one by Mary Rowlandson, about
[6:09]her abduction in 1675, because they filled it with, as they put it a bit whiny.
[6:15]This is a woman who's been shot, her child is shot through the bowels, dies in her arms,
[6:23]is eventually ransomed and then wrote about it.
[6:26]And to my surprise and anger that really removed this book, Mary Rowlandson's book from
[6:35]the syllabus.
[6:36]So that got my attention, especially as I was full of curiosity, admiration, sympathy
[6:44]for these women and no instance could I, would I think of them as being whiny, you know?
[6:53]What they went through was extraordinary.
[6:55]Sarah in my books does not suffer like that, and does align herself with the Native Americans,
[7:04]but does not stay with them.
[7:06]How did you know that this was removed from the Burley syllabus?
[7:09]Sorry, you said that again.
[7:11]How did you know it was removed from the syllabus at Burley?
[7:15]It was in this article.
[7:17]Oh, okay.
[7:18]I got it.
[7:19]I actually went to Burley for a couple of, like, until, till I was cool.
[7:24]But anyway, surprising isn't it?
[7:27]Yes.
[7:28]It is surprising.
[7:29]They were more sophisticated and more tolerant than that.
[7:32]Yes.
[7:33]They've gone through a lot of different leadership changes.
[7:35]I don't know when this fell or whatever, but who knows, whatever.
[7:39]Interesting.
[7:40]Do you find it depressing to sort of sit in all of these very difficult situations and write
[7:48]them, or is it somehow freeing to you, or cathartic, or, you know, because there's
[7:54]a lot of difficult material, not that you're the only author writing, but difficult material,
[7:58]of course.
[7:59]But for you personally, how does it feel to read five or six hours a day and then turn
[8:04]to writing and delve into very disturbing topics for the rest of us?
[8:10]I think a lot of it is, as I said, a little while ago, spurred by anger and I wish that
[8:20]I wish to explore and to explain and to describe what it was like for women, what it is
[8:27]like, always when I'm writing, which is always too a bit of a nightmare for me.
[8:33]It's not easy.
[8:35]I've read it.
[8:36]I spent an hour to walking around each morning before I'm even able to sit down and begin.
[8:42]I write in long hand, you throw a wealthy one said that writing, she didn't understand
[8:48]why people would come up to her and casually say, well, I wish I could write a book.
[8:54]It's just such a great life.
[8:56]And she said that her hair fell out, she's up there every day, she couldn't.
[9:02]She didn't know what people were talking, what people were imagining.
[9:05]So I don't vomit every day, as I come to that, I'm pleased to say, it's one does when
[9:15]at a certain point you're writing a book doesn't happen at first, especially because
[9:19]I have no idea what I'm doing.
[9:21]I don't always know what the ending is, I don't have a title, I'm not sure.
[9:26]I really just have a character and a circumstance, a setting.
[9:31]At a certain point, the book takes over and it has a life of its own and it moves you
[9:37]along.
[9:38]It captures you rather than being captured by you.
[9:44]So that is always helpful.
[9:48]But mainly what is it?
[9:50]I'm always what I'm writing thinking, what was really happening?
[9:54]What was it really like?
[9:57]What did it feel like to be a-
[10:00]on a packet on the Erie Canal, a woman with no money,
[10:05]really alone, not quite sure what would happen
[10:10]when you got to your destination, afraid, running away.
[10:14]What was that like?
[10:16]What would it have been like in 1855?
[10:19]So there was a lot of research, which, of course,
[10:22]is my favorite part.
[10:24]OK.
[10:26]How do you like to do your research?
[10:28]Or do go to libraries?
[10:30]Are you online digging around on Google?
[10:32]How do you, what's your favorite way?
[10:34]Well, lots and lots of books.
[10:36]And what are you doing before post-its?
[10:38]I'm sure I ruined a lot of books with underlines
[10:42]and exclamation points.
[10:45]So reading online, there was a lot written in essays,
[10:50]especially feminist essays about women
[10:53]in the West, about Sarah Wakefield, who was a real person.
[10:56]And she has her own narrative as I've said.
[11:02]But no one knew where she came from other than the fact
[11:05]that she lived in Rhode Island.
[11:08]No one really even knew her last name
[11:11]or how did she get to Minnesota world?
[11:15]So the internet, which I often abhor,
[11:20]proved to be extremely useful.
[11:22]And I had to change my attitude towards it,
[11:27]because I found out that who she was and that she was married
[11:33]and had a child, which I used in the book.
[11:37]So she's a big miss, which was not uncommon in the West.
[11:43]Interesting.
[11:45]So in that sense, the internet was very helpful.
[11:49]And also that I had often thought about that,
[11:52]how in countries that still had wide expenses of land
[11:56]in frontiers like Australia in Australia, it was similar.
[11:59]There was no bookkeeping.
[12:03]If there were churches or sports, town halls, nothing really
[12:07]was written down, nothing was checked.
[12:10]So there was a great deal of big of me,
[12:13]a great deal of starting new.
[12:17]And if it wasn't big a miss, having a completely new identity
[12:21]and history, a past, inventing your own past.
[12:25]Well, even in the book, when she gets together
[12:27]with her, you know, Yale Medicine-educated husband,
[12:31]she's like, he doesn't know anything about me.
[12:33]I mean, you didn't write it like that.
[12:34]You wrote it beautifully in all the rest.
[12:36]But just that she's like, I don't even know.
[12:39]How could he marry me?
[12:40]He doesn't know my past.
[12:41]He doesn't know any of my secrets.
[12:42]He doesn't know my story.
[12:44]And yet, here we go.
[12:46]off into the moonlight or whatever.
[12:48]And I feel like, you know, it's so interesting
[12:51]to have all those secrets.
[12:52]It's almost like the premise of a modern-day thriller
[12:56]where somebody comes and you don't know the backstory
[12:58]and what happens in the new relationship.
[13:00]And yet, of course, it's derived from crime truth here.
[13:04]Yes, and of course, it's very different now.
[13:06]What we are used to, we are accustomed now in many ways
[13:10]to knowing too much.
[13:12]And she knows very little about him as well.
[13:17]And the other thing the book is about, too,
[13:19]which interested me, kept me going, was that it was about,
[13:23]it is about a woman who tells lies, who lies, yep,
[13:29]and is believed as trusted as a lie,
[13:32]gets away with it, so to speak.
[13:34]And when she finally does tell the truth,
[13:38]at the end, the woman leaves her.
[13:41]That too got my attention.
[13:44]Well, I have to say, I did not go back
[13:45]and read your autobiographical novels from before.
[13:50]So what is your through line?
[13:54]What is the story I feel like I should know about you
[13:56]from your own life?
[13:57]Oh, I grew up in Hawaii where my family is from.
[14:03]I left home very young, too young, where I was 17.
[14:07]Maybe it was my grandmother to Philadelphia,
[14:09]went to work in here in New York at Burgdorffs,
[14:12]when it was quite different from what it is now.
[14:16]It was seen by a photographer, a designer,
[14:19]began to model, which I wasn't very good at that.
[14:23]It was always a little bit shy, a little bit embarrassed,
[14:26]not because I thought I was too fine,
[14:29]but because I knew I wasn't at ease and it showed.
[14:35]Ended up in California for 10 years married,
[14:39]came to live in London for a while, came to New York,
[14:42]lived in New York for 40 years.
[14:45]I teach at Princeton, seminar each fall.
[14:50]My students are fascinated that I did not go to college.
[14:53]They find that almost unbelievable,
[14:55]because so much emphasis has been placed on their own,
[15:00]to lead your life and their awareness
[15:03]of what it means to be at Princeton.
[15:05]So what else?
[15:06]I have a child, a daughter who's grown up
[15:09]and married quite a few times,
[15:11]because I live alone now very happily.
[15:15]And when did your hair turn white
[15:17]and is that a natural streak in your hair?
[15:20]Well, it was white very young in my 20s.
[15:23]So I was not white, but a lot of gray.
[15:26]And so I died it for years and years.
[15:29]And also for a while,
[15:31]fell under the delusion that a permanent looked great.
[15:35]So it was, you look at pictures, I think, oh, God.
[15:40]But it was the 90s.
[15:42]So industry is not real.
[15:44]No, interesting.
[15:47]I have my mom's, my not my mom.
[15:49]My best friend's step mom has the opposite.
[15:52]So she has all black with this one white streak
[15:55]and the exact same place.
[15:56]I feel like the two of you should get next to each other.
[15:58]Susan Sontag was the first person I saw with that
[16:02]and thought how striking it was.
[16:05]It was a way not to be what?
[16:08]Not to look too old.
[16:09]It had a certain vanity.
[16:10]It has a certain vanity in it.
[16:13]No, it's beautiful.
[16:14]It's very striking.
[16:16]I'm fascinated now by everyone's hair decisions
[16:20]as mine is starting to go gray.
[16:22]So I'm always talking to women like,
[16:24]okay, well, how did you decide to do that?
[16:26]I think today I let my hair go gray or not.
[16:28]Anyway, so it's quite fashionable now.
[16:32]Yes.
[16:33]Yeah, but yours looks beautiful.
[16:35]So you just don't know.
[16:35]You don't know if it's gonna look like yours
[16:37]or if it's gonna look terrible.
[16:38]But anyway, these are obviously not the,
[16:40]I think you have a little while to go a little what?
[16:45]What are you working on now?
[16:46]I'm thinking about, I've been reading a lot
[16:49]about the silver war and it alarms me
[16:53]because I do not want to write.
[16:56]I'm very careful not to write from the point of view
[17:00]of a character whose life in her life.
[17:05]I can't imagine, you know, that's why in this book,
[17:08]it is not from, I don't write too much
[17:13]about the Native Americans
[17:14]because I wouldn't presume to know
[17:16]what that experience would be.
[17:18]I know people do write about it.
[17:21]But in other books too, there's a book about a woman in India
[17:24]and there's another book about a woman in Berlin
[17:27]before the war.
[17:28]It's, I've always chosen to write
[17:31]from the point of view of an outsider.
[17:34]I'm pausing because it just occurred to me,
[17:36]maybe I feel like an outsider.
[17:39]As a woman, I imagine I do.
[17:42]So I'm reading a lot about the silver war.
[17:44]I don't know quite why.
[17:46]I'm so obsessed by it.
[17:50]There is a recent, John Meacham,
[17:54]the historian recently wrote that demographers now
[17:59]believe that 750,000 people were killed in the Civil War,
[18:07]which means that many people across the country
[18:11]were willing to accept that level of bloodshed
[18:15]in order to retain the power of enslaving
[18:18]that they're human beings.
[18:20]So that may be think about it too.
[18:24]But to write from the point of view of a southerner,
[18:28]I mean, certainly not, absolutely not
[18:33]to write from the point of view of an African American.
[18:36]So I don't quite know what I'm doing.
[18:38]I'm up to something.
[18:40]This is, this is, I have no doubt.
[18:43]I recently interviewed Drew Gilpin Fast,
[18:46]former head of Harvard.
[18:48]And she said she had written a biography about a slave owner
[18:52]because she just couldn't understand the psychology.
[18:54]And just like really wanted to delve into all the research
[18:57]and understand and that now she's considering writing
[19:00]a biography of someone who helped the opposite side
[19:03]of that coin in the same exact time period.
[19:05]And I feel like those two biographies
[19:08]would be so interesting.
[19:09]Different lenses kind of wish to be interesting.
[19:12]So interesting and all the diaries of that period,
[19:15]there's a famous one by a woman called Mary Chestnut.
[19:18]So a nonfiction would be all together different.
[19:22]Fiction, I mean, as I said, it's been done and done well.
[19:27]You know, even something like Gone with the Wind,
[19:30]which now is, I find a bit unreadable.
[19:32]You know, it's so romantic and in many ways inaccurate.
[19:37]But still it's in ways, it's Gone with the Wind.
[19:42]I saw that they're putting a new disclaimer page
[19:45]in the beginning of the book in the next three
[19:46]friends.
[19:47]Did you see that?
[19:48]Not knowing I did it in Gone with the Wind.
[19:50]Yes.
[19:51]And Gone with the Wind.
[19:53]So because of how African-Americans are treated, yes.
[19:57]Well, yes, I can understand that.
[20:00]that. Yeah. Gone with the windows, one of the first books. I had a thing when I was a young girl,
[20:06]I love to read all the time. And so I wanted to read like the longest books that could get my hands on.
[20:12]So that was one in my, in the repertoire, the longer the better. You said you read so much, obviously.
[20:19]What, what percent do you think is contemporary section versus not very much? And I'm always
[20:25]bowing to rectify that and, and do rectify it. But mostly it's, it's, it's reading books that
[20:35]I read before or, or, or I'm reading again at the moment. I'm reading all of Samuel Peep's
[20:43]diaries from starting in 1660. So things like that. I think for me too, it's, it's, it sort of
[20:53]would be the word. It's, it calls my brain. It's soothing and not, I don't come away distressed
[21:06]or anxious. Why? Because it's familiar because there's probably the third time I read it. But
[21:12]now I read mostly things I've read before, check off everything I've read before. I'm now
[21:19]reading more five and six times. Do you feel like you're on the outside of anything now?
[21:28]You were talking about maybe you write to work through your feelings of being an outsider yourself.
[21:34]Are there circumstances in which you find yourself an outsider right now?
[21:40]No, if I'm an outsider now and in certain ways, it's probably often by choice. But I do remember,
[21:48]I mean, I do think it has to do with being a woman. I do remember that moment in childhood
[21:53]was on my bicycle, my beloved blue swim. And, and realizing that being a girl was not
[22:05]necessarily to my advantage that as a girl, I was an outsider in this world of boys, you know,
[22:12]which I had before then been accepted. So that was a bit of a shock and confusing,
[22:22]especially going up in Hawaii where there was not, you know, there were not organized or
[22:27]in a sense of soccer on Saturday. It was quite wild and quite free and children roamed around
[22:34]together in the rainforest or in the ocean. So, but when that division became that divide,
[22:41]became obvious to me. And I had to accept that I was in some sense an outsider. I think
[22:51]I think that's where it began. Well, you definitely inside the literary establishment for what
[23:00]that's worth. You know, I don't think of myself as that way, but it would be nice if it's true.
[23:07]I also felt, I mean, one of the reasons I wrote in the cut was that after the first three books
[23:14]which were about growing up in Hawaii and coming to New York, and I realized that I was seen as
[23:21]was called a woman's writer, which meant that I wrote lyrically about, you know, flowers and
[23:30]children, motherhood. And I minded that. And so I determined that I would write a book like
[23:38]in the cut, something that was traditionally a genre inhabited by men mostly, noir, detective story
[23:49]dark. And when I began it, the female character was herself a detective, and I realized,
[23:57]no, that doesn't work. It's not quite, it's not, it's not, it's not doing what I want to do.
[24:03]So it was very much a book written by an outsider refusing to be so that makes sense.
[24:12]Yeah. I followed, I followed you. So what are your plans for today after this podcast?
[24:18]We have a beautiful day in New York. It's so beautiful, isn't it? It's so beautiful.
[24:23]I live in the West Village by the river, so I will go for a long walk and then of course read
[24:29]go back to my, my peeps and read again, read again. I've learned, I've come to like my isolation
[24:38]rather too much after five years of the pandemic. So I'm trying to overcome that desire for
[24:47]isolation and, and it's probably not, especially since summer is here and spring is here,
[24:56]it's probably not a good thing. So I'm working on that becoming more going out more.
[25:04]Yeah, I'm very comfortable at home. I really came to love my loneliness.
[25:11]It's okay, just still love it, but I need to, I need to get out more.
[25:17]Okay, well today's a nice day for it. So there you go.
[25:22]Susannah, it was really lovely chatting with you. Thank you for sharing so much of yourself
[25:27]and congratulations on your novel. Thank you very much. Thanks. Okay, bye bye.
[25:36]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[25:39]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at zibi Owens and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read
[25:44]Books. Also sign up for my newsletter at zibiowans.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet
[25:49]lots of authors on zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for
[25:54]the Sound Editing. And thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro
[25:59]and outro music.