Award-winning novelist Susanna Moore, whose books include "The Whiteness of Bones," set in the islands, the erotic thriller "In the Cut," and the dark prison tale "The Big Girls," is returning to Honolulu as a special guest at this weekend’s 8th Annual Hawaii Book and Music Festival.
She will read excerpts from one of her Hawaii novels and from her latest book, "The Life of Objects," and lead a discussion at 1:30 p.m. today in the Mission Memorial Auditorium near Honolulu Hale. The event is free.
Moore, 67, grew up in Hawaii, attending Punahou School from 1951 to 1963. She now lives in New York. As an author, creative-writing lecturer and travel enthusiast, she spends much of her time abroad.
"I used to wonder if I became a writer because of the Pacific Ocean. I used to wonder if the islands of Hawaii had made me a writer … ," she said in an email. "But if it were true that Hawaii makes writers, there would be far more of us."
Her first novel, "My Old Sweetheart" (1982), about a mother and daughter in a privileged kamaaina family, won the PEN/Hemingway Citation and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. That novel, with "The Whiteness of Bones" (1989) and "Sleeping Beauties" (1993), comprised her "Hawaii trilogy" that explored themes of identity, tradition and culture.
Like those early coming-of-age novels, "The Life of Objects" (Knopf Doubleday, $25) features a young female protagonist, but this time the setting is Berlin on the eve of World War II. The main character, Beatrice, is a young Irish lace maker who joins a household of aristocratic art collectors. They flee to a country estate to escape the growing Nazi terror, burying the couple’s priceless treasures around the grounds.
"It’s about man’s attachment to objects and delusions of safety — about the choices we make in trying times and the human capacity to persevere," Moore said. "I am preoccupied by the way that we conduct our lives in times of incalculable stress, for example, life in Berlin for ordinary Germans during the second World War. Crises always present a moral dilemma: How are we to behave virtuously and still manage to succeed, if not survive?"
Much of Moore’s early work reflects her experiences here. She said the trilogy is incorrectly seen as "more memoir than fiction."
Moore did pen a memoir of sorts, 2003’s "I Myself Have Seen It: The Myth of Hawaii," in which she interweaves personal memories of growing up in Honolulu with a historical examination of the West’s impact on the islands.
The author recalls spending much of her childhood reading at school and public libraries. By age 10, she was working her way through the adult-fiction section, presenting the disapproving librarian with a note from her mother swearing the books were for her own use.
Moore said she spends months, sometimes years, researching her novels and visiting the places she writes about.
"I don’t begin to write until I know that I have at least the beginning of my story — and by beginning, I really mean my main character. I don’t know too much when I begin a novel, certainly not the ending," she said.
"I find it difficult to stop my research in preparation for a book, the study of my subject being most seductive, as well as a way not to write, but I eventually force myself to stop reading and to begin writing. I find the long days of reading and taking notes soothing as well as provocative of thought, and it is extremely difficult for me to stop."
Moore is currently writing a series of essays on 19th-century Hawaii.
