By Danielle Bettendorf Asst. living and arts editor
Feminist memoirist Honor Moore will read a selection of her works at Susquehanna on March 6.
The reading will take place in Isaacs Auditorium and will begin at 7:30 p.m.
Moore’s range of work includes poetry, nonfiction and plays. Her most recent memoir, “The Bishop’s Daughter,” reflects on her father, Episcopal Bishop Paul Moore, who hid his sexuality throughout his life.
Compared with the other authors who have visited this year, Moore works more with nonfiction than any other genre.
“She’s the only visitor this year who is coming mostly to talk about nonfiction,” said Glen Retief, director of the Writer’s Institute and associate professor of English and creative writing. “[‘The Bishop’s Daughter’] is very much a memoir in that tradition which focuses mostly on introspection, analysis, understanding, thinking against the South [and] thinking through difficult questions.”
Retief also noted that memoirists can be caught between wanting to tell their story and keeping their lives private.
“I think the act of writing an intimate family memoir like ‘The Bishop’s Daughter’ is inherently a controversial one, because one is exposing one’s own family,” Retief said. “You’re writing about intimate things that happened within your own family life.”
Retief also pointed out that memoirs, especially those which feature famous public figures, can get tangled up in the subject’s public image.
“There’s always an element of writing a memoir that is going to feel like exposure for the people who are being written about,” Retief said. “When the person is a public figure, like Bishop Paul Moore, that just gets intensified, because then people are reading about a public figure who they might’ve had feelings about or seen in a certain way or been invested in.”
“They read the book, and they may or may not meet the Paul Moore that they always believed existed,” Retief continued. “I think [Moore] was brave to write that book, and I think it’s an important book. I think it raises very useful questions about the genre of nonfiction.”
Students in Retief’s nonfiction classes who have been studying Moore’s work also noted the dilemma that memoirists have of trying to tell their story but also being hesitant to share personal experiences with the public.
“I think that a big thing with nonfiction is knowing your subject and whether or not it’s okay to release the news into the larger world,” senior Jessica Dartnell said. “That’s something we’ve talked about in class: what are the consequences of it, but also what are the benefits of putting it out into the world.”
“I know so many nonfiction writers who are afraid of writing about certain things, especially certain things that happened in college, because those people at college might read those things,” junior Ian Rush said. “However, those things that happen at college that might make for a really good story [that] might need to get out there.”
Retief also connected the dilemma of the memoirist back to his own work in nonfiction.
“In my author’s note in my own memoir, I said that if private lives remain safely sealed, how will we ever learn from each other?” Retief said. “There are lots of difficult questions for memoirists about balancing respect for people’s privacy versus the need to share the wisdom from personal lives with the world.”
“[Moore] writes about her father having had a secret gay life, and he never wanted the world to know about that,” Retief said. “Yet Moore argues in the book that the secret life of his was connected to his empathy: the fact that he had the secret side made him more empathetic to racial oppression, to class oppression, to poverty.”
“Having this sort of wound in his heart gave him more of a love of other people,” Retief added. “I would say it’s useful for me to know that about this famous person. Paul Moore’s story becomes inspiring to me, but I’m being inspired by an example that the man himself never wanted to be available to me. So for me, it’s wonderful to have this example, but he would never have wanted me to have it: what are the ethics of that?”
