Susanna Moore (born December 9, 1945) is an American writer and teacher. Born in Pennsylvania but raised in Hawaii, Moore worked as a model and script reader in Los Angeles and New York City before beginning her career as a writer. Her first novel, My Old Sweetheart, published in 1982, earned a PEN Hemingway nomination, and won the Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She followed this with The Whiteness of Bones in 1989, and her third novel, Sleeping Beauties, in 1993. All three of these novels were set in Hawaii and charted dysfunctional family relationships.

Moore gained particular critical notice for her fourth novel, In the Cut (1995), which marked a departure from her previous works in both setting and content, concerning a New York City teacher who has a sexual affair with a detective investigating violent murders and dismemberments in her neighborhood. It was adapted into a 2003 feature film of the same name by director Jane Campion.

Biography[edit]

Moore was born December 9, 1945 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.^[1] Shortly after her birth, her family relocated to Hawaii, where she spent her formative years, and attended the Punahou School in Honolulu.^[2] She is the oldest of seven children, and was raised by her widowed father, a physician; her mother died in her childhood.^[3]

Susanna Moore (born December 9, 1945) is an American writer and teacher. Born in Pennsylvania but raised in Hawaii, Moore worked as a model and script reader in Los Angeles and New York City before beginning her career as a writer. Susanna Moore discusses her new memoir MISS ALUMINUM with Eva Vives for Chevalier's Books. This is a free event on Zoom. S Oldest Independent Bookstore, Est. Susanna Moore is the author of several books, including a memoir, I Myself Have Seen It: The Myth of Hawai'i. Denise Applewhite/Knopf Fat chance, not with those tanks ready to roll into Poland.

At age seventeen, Moore returned to the mainland United States to live in Philadelphia with her grandmother.^[4] She later lived in New York City and Los Angeles, working as a model and script reader.^[1] For a time in the late 1960s, she worked as Warren Beatty's assistant in California.^[5] She published her first book, My Old Sweetheart, in 1982, followed by The Whiteness of Bones in 1989, and Sleeping Beauties in 1993—all three books, set in her home state of Hawaii, dealt with themes of familial dysfunction.^[6] For My Old Sweetheart, Moore earned a PEN Hemingway nomination, and won the Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.^[1]

Her fourth novel, In the Cut, a thriller novel about a teacher in New York City who begins a sexual relationship with a detective investigating nearby murders, marked a notable departure from Moore's previous works,^[1] and was adapted into a feature film of the same name in 2003 by director Jane Campion.

In 1999, she received the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Moore went on to publish two works in 2003: the British India-set novel One Last Look,^[1] and the non-fiction I Myself Have Seen It: The Myth of Hawai‘i, an autobiographical work that explored Moore's upbringing in Hawaii.

In 2006, Moore received a Fellowship in Literature at the American Academy in Berlin;^[7] and in 2006 she received a Fellowship in Literature from the Asian Cultural Council, which entailed a three-month fellowship to research on the Meiji Period in Japan.^[8]

Susanna Moore Memoir Collection

Moore was visiting lecturer in Creative Writing at Yale University in 1988, 1989 and 1994; visiting lecturer at New York Graduate School in 1995; creative writing teacher at the Metropolitan Detention Center, Brooklyn between 2004 and 2006;^[9] and lecturer of creative writing at Princeton University between 2007 and 2009. During May to August 2009, Moore was Writer-in-Residence at Australia's University of Adelaide. As of a 2012 interview, Moore resided in her home state of Hawaii, though she returns to the East Coast each year to teach courses at Princeton University for the fall semester.^[10]

Publications[edit]

Fiction[edit]

• My Old Sweetheart (1982)
• The Whiteness of Bones (1989)
• Sleeping Beauties (1993)
• In the Cut (1995)
• One Last Look (2003)
• The Big Girls (2007)
• The Life of Objects (2012)

Non-fiction[edit]

• I Myself Have Seen It: The Myth of Hawai‘i (2003)
• Paradise of the Pacific: Approaching Hawai‘i (2015)
• Miss Aluminum: A Memoir (2020)

References[edit]

1. ^ ^abcde'Susanna Moore Papers, 1940–2019'. Philadelphia Area Archives Research Portal. University of Pennsylvania. Retrieved March 4, 2020.
2. ^'Susanna Moore: Resume'. SusannaMoore.com. Retrieved March 3, 2020.
3. ^Moore, Susanna (November 30, 1995). 'Susanna Moore'. The Charlie Rose Show (Interview). Interviewed by Charlie Rose.
4. ^Schwarzbaum, Lisa (April 14, 2020). 'From Hollywood 'Pretty Girl' to Empowered Novelist'. The New York Times. Retrieved April 15, 2020.
5. ^Peter Biskind 'Star' Warren Beatty Biography
6. ^'In the Cut'. Publishers Weekly. 1995. Archived from the original on March 3, 2020.
7. ^'Citigroup Fellow, Class of Fall 2006'. American Academy in Berlin. Archived from the original on December 30, 2012. Retrieved March 11, 2012.
8. ^'Susanna Moore'. Asian Cultural Council. Archived from the original on March 4, 2020.
9. ^'Susanna Moore'. House of Speakeasy. Archived from the original on March 4, 2020.
10. ^'Susanna Moore'. PBS Hawai'i. June 25, 2019. Retrieved March 4, 2020.

External links[edit]

Susanna Moore Photos

Susanna Moore Memoir Summary

• Susanna Moore at IMDb
• Susanna Moore papers at the University of Pennsylvania

I Myself Have Seen It: The Myth of Hawaii

By Susanna Moore

National Geographic Directions, 184 pages, $20

Susanna Moore spent her childhood in Hawaii, the daughter of two parents with movie-star looks, the sister of two brothers and eventually a sister, a member of 'a mainly haole [white] elite' society. 'On the weekends,' Moore writes in 'I Myself Have Seen It,' her enthralling memoir/history book, 'we went into the mountains, depending on the season, to pick ginger and to dig up rare ferns to grow in pots, and to float down the flumes, absolutely forbidden to us, that carried the cold mountain water that irrigated the pineapple and cane fields.'

Oh what a childhood it was. Oh what opportunities were reveled in by a wide-eyed, intelligent, mischievous girl. Moore had the great good sense in her youth to be alive to Hawaii's allure--to swim all day long, to travel from island to island, to eat even the flowers that she found.

'When I was nine,' she writes, 'I was taught to ride a surfboard in Waikiki by the beach-boy Rabbit Kekai. . . . Ankle bands that attached by plastic cord to the board had not been invented. Neither Rabbit nor myself found it unseemly or even uncomfortable to assume our position--I would lie on my stomach facing the front of the board with my legs pleasantly spread so that he could slide on behind me. He also lay on his stomach, between my legs, his chin resting on my bottom.'

Susanna Moore Memoir Death

'I Myself Have Seen It' is a book about the myths of Hawaii--a book about history, primarily, until the myths Moore wishes to reflect upon become her own. Over the course of its first many chapters, the book explores the antecedents of Hawaiian culture--the seeds that washed ashore; the Polynesians who arrived from the South Pacific in 600 A.D.; the adventures of Capt. James Cook and his men, who appeared in the midst of a thunderstorm in 1778; the missionaries who invaded in the early 19th Century, determined to endow the natives with purifying enlightenment. There are myths, Moore persuasively argues, attached to every one of these events, ways of positioning or retelling the tales that affect the very idea of what Hawaii was and is.

Moreover, with the arrival of each new culture or population came the eradication of something precious and irreplaceable. The rats that were likely canoed across the oceans attacked and decimated the native flightless birds. The cows that were introduced by one Capt. Vancouver chomped through native plant life, fowl and local thatched roofs. And the missionaries, determined to 'improve' the lives of the people, decreed local customs godless and replaced them with instructions in English grammar, religion and needlework:

'The chants and hula, most of which had been passed from generation to generation for centuries, were forbidden; a suppression that would prove catastrophic for the Hawaiians. The chants contained everything a person needed to know about the world; it was a way to worship the gods, to call warriors to battle, to mourn a king, to court a lover, to celebrate the birth of a child.'

With its historical sweep and its intimate revelations, with its emphasis on myths and what they mean, 'I Myself Have Seen It' is a marvelous hybrid of a book, an engrossing read even for those of us who have not yet pulled a guava from a tree.