When Susanna Moore gave a eulogy for old friend Joan Didion at her memorial in September, she spoke about some of the maxims Didion had given her. One of them was: “Stop running away.”
“Why would she say that?,” I ask the 77-year-old author, a magnetic woman with long silver hair cut by an iconic dark streak, remarkably elegant even over Zoom.
“It’s very hard for me to believe in stability. I’m quick to move. Maybe it’s more flattering to say I’m always in movement. But that’s, in a way, wriggling out of it. That’s making it sound romantic, adventuresome, brave … when in fact it’s about survival.”
“And have you stopped,” I ask, “running away?”
She looks down for a moment, considering the question. “No, I don’t think I have.”
A New Frontier
Susanna Moore is publishing her ninth novel, The Lost Wife, this coming week. And just as she’s not done running away, she’s not done pushing herself into radically new territory. In this case, the territory is the frontier: mid-19th-century Minnesota, with a story inspired by the historical account of Sarah F. Wakefield’s capture by Mdewakanton warriors during the Sioux Uprising of 1862.
“During the pandemic I was, like everyone, isolated. I found myself reading captivity narratives,” she says, when I ask her how the idea for the book came to her. “They were almost all written by women, mostly in the 17th and 18th century, taking place in the Northeast. Women captured from small towns. Many of them died. Many of them were held for ransom, and some chose to stay with their captors. They married, had children, would not return.
“Sarah’s story was different. It was much later, mid-19th century, and during the Civil War. There were trains. It was the West, which was unusual. And as I was reading her journal, I found that I didn’t quite believe her. I knew she was lying.”
“Maybe it’s more flattering to say I’m always in movement. But that’s … making it sound romantic, adventuresome, brave … when in fact it’s about survival.”
Often in Moore’s career, her characters (and, in certain instances, she herself) have been called distant. Aloof. In writing her own memoir, Miss Aluminum (2020), she admits she was “a little taken aback by how passive I seemed.... I can never think too far ahead. So it does appear as if I let things happen to me. But that’s not The Lost Wife. Sarah is causing things, which is why it’s necessary to lie and dissemble. She forces things to happen until she’s abducted. And then … ”
Susanna Moore just smiles. Sarah doesn’t lie for fun. From the first page, she’s on the run from a marriage so violent it’s certain to be fatal. Sarah’s lying makes her the author of her own survival.
After reading The Lost Wife, I read and re-read most of Moore’s work. I began to see lines of continuity, the layering of her obsessions, creating a palimpsest: the attention to articles of clothing, each one a costume; the braiding of sex and violence. Moore is often called a “cult” writer. I find her to be one of the most compelling novelists alive.
Her breakout, at 49, was the noir masterpiece In the Cut (1995), which was made into a Jane Campion film of the same name. Her memoir, Miss Aluminum, was published to universal praise. It put Moore the woman in a slant of spotlight.
Moore’s life has been marked by fortuitous twists of fortune and fate. She was a young woman adrift in Hawaii, New York, Los Angeles. Before writing her first novel, she held a variety of odd jobs: a salesgirl at Bergdorf Goodman, a model, a script reader for Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson. She wound up in a bohemian milieu in Los Angeles that included Joan Didion and Roman Polanski, adjacent to all kinds of industry glamor, but still an outsider. Miss Aluminum leaves her a single mother, starting over. Her story is Dickensian, the stuff of novels. Some say it is the stuff of her novels.
I find that a short-sighted approach to her oeuvre. Since One Last Look (her 2003 novel of British colonialism in India) and The Life of Objects (her 2012 World War II novel and a personal favorite) Moore has been writing concise and brutally incisive historical fiction, parables of women in transformation. It’s those two books in whose company The Lost Wife belongs.
All her books, including the so-called Hawaii trilogy (1982’s My Old Sweetheart, 1989’s The Whiteness of Bones, and 1993’s Sleeping Beauties), are fairly obsessed with imperialism, the delusional Edens they create and the dire consequences. Her tackling the apex of American mythology—white settlers facing off against Native American tribes—is a natural evolution.
Another hallmark of Moore’s work is an unsparing intimacy with violence and suffering. The Lost Wife is no exception. I was fascinated by the details of mid-19th-century life for a woman.
“With this book I wanted to convey the lawlessness,” Moore says. “There was a lot of bigamy. Especially with the building of the railroad. People could just hop on and disappear. There was a tremendous amount of second, third, fourth, fifth marriages without the benefit of law.
“And the other thing I wanted to show was just how difficult it was. How dirty. How crude.”
One of the more revelatory aspects of The Lost Wife is how embodied Sarah is. Her days are tied to her body: her waste, her smell, her weight, her face. This is not a historical novel with a civilizing retrospective lens. It’s a hygienic disaster.
I tell Moore I was especially shocked when Sarah got her period and had no way to temper the blood flow. “What the fuck did women do?,” I ask her.
“First of all, women didn’t wear underwear. And second, I came across a journal of a woman in 19th-century London, who describes her maid, following her on her hands and knees, wiping up the drips of blood on the floor.”
My jaw drops.
As ever, Susanna Moore is unflinching. She laughs. “That, understandably, got my attention.”
The Lost Wife, by Susanna Moore, will be published on April 4 by Knopf
Stephanie Danler is the author of a novel, Sweetbitter, and a memoir, Stray. She is currently working on a new novel and a screenplay