Susanna Moore and Jill Ker Conway



Susanna Moore

David and I were fortunate to attend a writer’s workshop with Susanna Moore, author of “In the Cut”, her most popular work.  She asked us to read her first novel, “My Old Sweetheart” before we came.

She said that authors usually write biographical works for the first three or four books, but then they realize they have run out of stories and begin to make them up and create characters of their own.

I’ve heard this before, so it must be good advice, and that is, to first imagine a character.  Imagine everything about her.  What does she look like, where does she live, what does she like to eat, her favorite color.  Then get even deeper into the character, creating a history, family, grandparents, schools, where she gets her hair cut.  Create her childhood, her adult life, her own children, and her life in old age.  Get to know her so well that somehow her story needs to be told.  This was Susanna's advice.

Susanna researches the times, the daily life, the environment of her character.  She said she likes to choose a woman, and that she is alive at the end of the story.  But in one novel, the character instead became a man, and he died.

Another interesting insight into being an author is that once she created a character who, as the writing of the novel progressed, she realized the protagonist hated her sister.  So she had to go back to the beginning and put in hints that this was true.  And once the editor pointed out that no one in the novel had anything to do with food.  No one ate, no one even mentioned anything edible.  So she had to go back and insert food references.  Also, once a character in the 1850's was being created and she needed to know the practices surrounding menstruation.  She had to research this, and then added this to her novel in the appropriate context.

She stated that researching for the novel, as she is doing now in Hawaii since May, is the fun part of writing.  Once it is done, she has to buckle down and write.  She uses lots of sticky notes to remind her of her findings, and makes notes each day to be reviewed the following day over coffee.

I asked a question about how it feels to be writing intimate things about herself and others, and how she deals with this.  She said she has tried to be careful, getting feedback from people she knows before publication.  She said that her daughter, now in her mid thirties, is also a writer.  Her book is an autobiographical novel.  She has asked Susanna for feedback, and she has given comments about the style, etc. and not touched on the intimate details that will be revealed.  However she thinks that the part referring to Susanna's present boyfriend may be hurtful and is hopeing her daughter will make changes.

Susanna's first endeavor, the one we read, was also an autobiographical novel in many ways and related to her and her relationship with her Mother.  I found it very confusing, disjointed, revealing and sad.  After her workshop, I learned that some of the confusion resulted from her quick transitions from present day to her childhood.  I did not notice her use of first person when she was in the present, and third person, when as a child.  There were few chapters, and many ∞ breaks.  Not much was revealed as to why things were the way they were or why things happened.  For example, her Mother just left one day.  The children were apparently not told anything, so they believed she was gone for good, maybe dead, but her departure was just surrounded in mystery.  Later, she came back with wounds on her forehead.  The reader had to figure out that she was probably in a mental institute and had a lobotomy.   It was never verified.  The author presented everything from  the perspective ofher 8 year old self, who had no idea but what she experienced.  This presentation of events from the child’s viewpoint, which left a lot out, was confusing to me who wanted to know the answers.  But the author made the reader figure it out, which you eventuall did.

What I figured out  and which was verified, was that her Mother became upset at her husband’s infidelity (which the children observed but didn’t observe, just having to sit in the car to wait for their Dad was all that was said about it).  She must have had a mental break at some point and went off to the hospital.  Surprising that for the time, apparently nothing was explained to the children by the father.  Later, the mother eventually committed suicide.   But even that was obscure. 

“In the Cut”, by Moore, sounds like a very interesting read.  She said it involved every form of sexual intercourse known to man except bestiality and necro-whatever you call it.  No surprise it was a best seller.

Susanna herself is a work of art.  She is a strikingly beautiful 66 year old woman, educated at the prestigious  Punaho school in Waikiki.  She says she never went to college.  She reads voraciously, however.  She is a professor at Princeton and has lived in India and Germany.  She presents herself as a dignified intellectual artist.

Jill Ker Conway

Before " My Old Sweetheart", I finished reading “The Road from Coorain” by Jill Ker Conway.  It is also autobiographical.  It also is written by a highly intelligent woman, about 70 years old now, who grew up on a station in Australia.  Her world was turned upside down by the sudden untimely death of her Father.  She too left for New York and an intellectual writing and education career, eventually becoming the first woman President of Smith College.   Her memoir, written in 1989, described the deterioration of her mature Mother before the end of her life, as if she had a mental breakdown.  It reads to me like her Mother actually was experiencing Alzheimer’s disease.  I wonder what Ms. Conway would think of that interpretation today.

I was struck, especially after meeting Susanna Moore, about the similarities of these two authors, in age, intelligence, fierce independence, and character strength, especially considering the times in which they grew and matured – times in which I am familiar – times when being a strong, intelligent, unusual woman stood out in the crowd.  I should have asked Ms. Moore if they knew each other, but of course I couldn’t remember Jill Ker Conway’s name due to my “age related attention deficit disorder”.

Susanna Moore has authored eight books and is about to publish her ninth.  She is in Hawaii, her home state where she grew up but left for greener intellectual pastures, in order to research her next novel.  She said her works are relatively unknown here in spite of the fact that the first three are set in Hawaii.

Jill Ker Conway has also authored at least four other books.  She never returned to live in Australia.

The Road from Coorain; An Australian Memoir