Saturday at the Writers and Readers Festival – Susanna Moore
Maggie Rainey-Smith reports

Well, Caroline Baum dispensed with any lengthy or fawning style introduction and went right to the heart of the matter with one small anecdote – that Susanna Moore left Hawaii as a young woman with 20 pairs of alligator shoes.    They always say that the opening line of a novel, or at least the first page, is crucial to capturing your reader.   You have to say that Baum did a grand job of riveting the primarily female audience with this introduction.

Susanna Moore (pic right, Lulu Sylbert), was a treat.   She is a woman of a certain age (actually 65 I think she said), with long blonde hair (but it works) very stylish, very composed, intelligent, humorous and entirely likeable.   The story about her shoes provided a lovely segue into her upbringing in Hawaii, where mostly as a young girl it seems, she ran about shoeless, or in rubber flip-fops.    She went in fact to the same school as Barack Obama (not of course, at the same time) and even went so far as to describe her home town of Paauilo, Hawaii, as similar to Wellington.   You can imagine our surprise after the weather bomb yesterday, being compared to Hawaii, but she went on to explain she meant in the nicest way, and asking our forgiveness... the provincialism.   She spoke of her childhood in the fifties, slightly idealised, as growing up oblivious to sexual stereotypes where boys and girls romped and played with equality, not organised sport, but just encounters with the natural landscape.   Hilariously she said the only difference that she observed about boys back then, was that they were able to urinate standing up ‘which was a torment to me’.    Moore also talked about the need always to seek permission from the indigenous Hawaiian people to go into the forest, to go and collect ferns or to swim in the rock pools, and how natural and normal this seeking of permission was back then.   It was seen as a “simple, but definite, request”.   Although, it seems now, the environment is much more political and less racially tolerant.  She spoke a little about Obama and felt that his physicality, gait, his racial tolerance, the way he is at ease with himself (these are her words), is a gift from Hawaii.

Baum probed the theme of sexual abuse in Moore’s work which led to a discussion about how Moore had been inappropriately touched by the family gardener when she was nine years of age.  This man was Japanese, the family gardener, and a dear friend to Moore as a child.   She knew she had to tell her mother, but she also knew at that age, that if she did tell her mother, she would in her words “lose her best friend.”    She said it was an early lesson in consequences for your actions, even if your actions are correct.  (She did tell her mother and she recalled the moment when her father, a doctor arrived home from work, during the day, still in his white coat, standing in the driveway with the gardener whom she never saw again).
Moore worked for Warren Beatty in Hollywood and when Baum asked her if the wild estimates of the number of women Warren had slept with had been underestimated or exaggerated, she admitted she had tried to do the sums, but couldn’t believe it was possible.

Which led her to talk about current mores and her own dismay at one of her own friend’s admission of 96 lovers and still counting – so you can see the discussion was wide ranging and the next leap was quite breath-taking because somehow Baum raised the topic of Roman Polanski and who would have imagined... it turns out that he is in fact Godfather to Susanna Moore’s daughter.   Baum coped well with this revelation – these two women were well matched on stage, both honest, and open and shall we say, not easily shocked.   So Baum bravely asked the next question, which was what did Moore think about Polanski, and should he be held accountable.   Without hesitation Moore told us that yes, indeed, Polanski should return to America and face up to his actions.   She told us that she had lived with Roman Polanski in a house in Malibu and that he was “bad in this way” and added, “He is guilty, you cannot sentimentalise, or romanticise it – he has to answer for it.”   But, also that she does not wish to see him go to prison.  
Well, you can see, this was no tame chat entirely about craft or genre.
Having said that, the discussion did arise as to why Hawaii has always been so stereotyped by Hollywood, or as Baum asked “Why can’t Hollywood tell the Hawaiian story?”   Moore said that there is no film school, nor any state funding for anything in Hawaii that might lead to the story coming from inside of Hawaii.    Moore added, “You could say this about all of Polynesia.”  She spoke too of a sovereignty movement currently in Hawaii which is awakening hostility towards whites.

    The discussion moved to Moore’s research about women’s prisons and women on death row who have killed their children, and Moore explained she found she did not actually like all of the women she encountered and described it as akin to a kindergarten teacher finding out on her first day of teaching that actually, she didn’t like all of the children.   Moore’s own mother was dead at the age of 35 when Moore was just twelve years old, in what sounded like quite mysterious circumstances, but we did not linger there, although I for one was keenly interested to know more.   But it did sound as if the two experiences, one of sexual abuse by a family friend and her mother’s mysterious death, had lasting impact on her and obviously on her writing.   She described writing about characters or people who have done something horrid as a “fantasy of control”, as a kind of salvation.     Moore teaches creative writing in prisons and when asked which she preferred, her students at Princeton or the prisoners, she hesitated only momentarily and with a tactfully mischievous smile, said she found teaching in the prisons more “interesting”.

    There was Moore (ah, couldn’t resist that pun) – but truly, so much conversation was packed into the session and Baum, who has obviously read all, or most of Moore’s work was the perfect chair for this occasion, allowing gritty, interesting and difficult topics to be raised and gracefully explored.   Moore has poise and sophistication and another interesting quality, which she describes as “being fascinated and compelled by my own disobedience”.   I think this shone through in her reactions and the thoughtful manner in which she responded to questions – not always dead certain exactly what she thought about something, until she stopped to think, right there and then.   She was keen to be conceived of as “politically incorrect”.

I rushed out (of course I did) and purchased “The Big Girls” which is evidently, according to the blurb on the back “an electrifying novel about the anarchy of families, the sometimes destructive power of maternal instinct, and the cult of celebrity.”  I would have liked my own private conversation with Susanna because I too teach creative writing at a local women’s prison and I am looking forward to reading her work.

Footnote:
Warm thanks to Maggie Rainey-Smith for this report on Susanna Moore's session..
Maggie Rainey-Smith is a Wellington novelist/poet/bookseller and regular guest blogger on Beattie's Book Blog.