^A

SUSANNA MOORE

— I started on the memoir because friends had been encouraging me to write about that period of ten years when I was in Los Angeles, not because my life was so particularly unusual but because Los Angeles in the late Sixties and Seventies was particularly vivid. When I finally did, I was determined not to write about my childhood, because I was tired of telling stories about it. I had done it so much in the first three books, and even in subsequent articles. It seemed to seep into my work quite a bit. I assumed readers were tired of it, too.

 

But when I started writing about my time in California, I realised that I couldn’t leave out my childhood or the story of my mother because if I did, many of my decisions, a lot of my behaviour, my view of the world, my depression, my breakdown, bad decisions, good decisions, had no context. You needed to know what had happened to me in order, I suppose to put it coarsely, to like me.

^A

SUSANNA MOORE

— It was the end of an era, one in which fantasy played a large part, fed by movie magazines and fan clubs. And fed by secrecy. The publicity allowed by the very powerful studios was tightly controlled. By the Seventies, that had changed. Directors were more powerful than studios and movie stars, and they were not particularly glamorous. There is a book by a woman named Jean Howard of photographs of the many pool parties and dinners and Malibu picnics in the Forties and Fifties, everyone dressed rather formally although beautifully, in which relationships are implied rather than revealed {Jean Howard’s Hollywood: A Photo Memoir (1989)}. The photographs are all on the surface, nothing intimate, nothing illicit, which of course allows the imagination full play. The only hint of naughtiness is photographs of women in dresses who have clearly been pushed into a swimming pool to great hilarity.

 

I remember inviting Jack Nicholson to {the L.A. society hostess} Connie Wald’s for dinner. And he would say, ‘Oh no, do I have to go to that old lady’s house with all those old people? And of course, the old people to whom he referred were Jimmy Stewart and Audrey Hepburn, among others. Jack had already entered a different Hollywood: Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, lots of drugs, road pictures, movies made solely on location. He had already removed himself or was removed from that world.

^A

SUSANNA MOORE

— It’s arbitrary, and it is unreliable, which all of us know because of conversations we have with friends or relatives who have shared an experience with us. This became very clear to me when I finished the memoir and I sent it to my brothers and sisters, and some friends who appeared in it. I told them that if there was anything in it they objected to, I would change it or even take it out. Nobody asked me to take anything out, but there were many people who had completely different memories of a specific event than I had, which completely fascinated me.

^A

SUSANNA MOORE

— I do think it happens more to women, and it’s another example of a kind of intellectual diminishment of women in that it assumes that women can only write about themselves. I have heard writers say that no woman could ever have written, say, War and Peace (1867) because they can’t imagine or encompass great historic events. So, there’s that. The other thing is I unknowingly encouraged the assumption that all of my books are about me, because the first three books are autobiographical. The later books are not about me, and In the Cut was not about me. Although with In the Cut, I think it was quite titillating for readers to imagine that I was writing about myself – it made it more erotic, it made it more exciting, it made it more shocking.

 

It was distressing for a while, especially in the reactions that I received from men, who thought I had a certain decadence and dissipation and availability. It was as if I had joined a select male club in which I could speak coarsely about women. Men would call my attention to another woman’s breasts. And I would say, ‘I’m not your buddy, I don’t want to talk about her breasts.’

^A

SUSANNA MOORE

— It was just awful, that interview. It was considered quite helpful as a writer or as a public person to be interviewed by him. Later, he lost his job and was vilified because of accusations of horrible sexual harassment, which had a certain irony. That interview… he was harassing me. It was very, very uncomfortable. He was flirtatious.

^A

SUSANNA MOORE

— Yes, I tried to watch it a few years ago and couldn’t. Right before the interview – I don’t know if he meant to unnerve me or he just couldn’t help himself – but he whispered to me, ‘I just want you to know I share your fantasies.’ Of course, he meant my sexual fantasies which he assumed I had depicted in the book, which I had not. I have no fantasy about handcuffs.

 

Maybe it was something he did, a technique that I know interviewers use to throw you off a little, so that your answers are less banal and conventional, to rattle you a little. It did rattle me. In the little part of the interview I saw I appear very stiff. I’m not relaxed.

^A

SUSANNA MOORE

— Well, of course that was ironic. Nothing in a book is accidental, even if the writer is not conscious of it as he’s writing. It’s all deliberate. But did I worry about that? No. I should have worried more about how people were going to perceive Franny’s intentions, though. I was surprised that some readers thought Franny was seeking to be killed by violent preferably erotic means, but that was naive of me. Readers will always see what they want to see, but it is the writer’s responsibility to make sure, as much as is possible, that his or her intentions are not open to misinterpretation. I wish I had made it clearer that Franny is neither masochistic or suicidal.

^A

SUSANNA MOORE

— Not many people saw it that way, but enough. Usually men, who were rather excited by it, eroticised by it, they thought it was very sexy. They liked that dynamic. I was appalled by the sadism of it and the obvious fantasy on the part of the person speaking to me, that this was the sort of erotic relationship that he wanted or liked. This was made clear to me in their assumption of a particularly masculine intimacy which the book, in their view, allowed them. It was evident in the way certain men began to speak to me about women, assuming that I shared their misogyny or at best their desires. The book was also intimidating for some men, who rather revealingly told me that they would never dare ask me on a date after reading it.

 

The thing that happens to me is that I fall in love with my characters. I fell madly in love with the woman in The Big Girls (2007) who kills her children. And I suppose I was offended on Franny’s behalf that someone would think she was trying to get killed.

^A

SUSANNA MOORE

— She’s based a little on my sister, my younger sister, who suffered greatly from our stepmother’s cruelty, in part because she has that quality that Pauline has of speaking out, not holding back her opinions. Not being easily seduced by charm. My sister is and was always quite wary and suspicious of charm. She would stand up to my stepmother, at least in the beginning, while the rest of us were just cowed and terrified. Part of that came from her personality which was not defiant, the way I was, but she was more willing to stand up for what she believed in, while I was willing to stand up for whatever caught my fancy in the moment.

^A

SUSANNA MOORE

— First of all, it was so gothic and so extreme, her cruelty. We had lots of beloved pets as children, three dogs and birds and a cat, a chicken, we were very attached to our animals as children. Not long after she came, we woke up one morning and they were all gone. They had been killed or given away or drowned or – we never knew. We searched for them. It seems as if we were always searching for something, our mother and then our beloved dogs. And to write about things like that… it’s just too much in a way.

^A

SUSANNA MOORE

— I think part of that is probably style. My editor and publisher, Sonny Mehta, who died recently, used to say to me after reading a first draft of a novel that the writing was too cool, too detached. Too subtle. He was often right, and I would try to make the book less cool. I think to describe the beating, I mean – how to describe the beating. We all know what a beating is like, I think. It was not particular. He wasn’t wearing brass knuckles. I thought to describe it was not necessary.

 

It’s the same with writing about sex. In In the Cut, I don’t really describe how people feel, I just describe what is happening. And that was a very conscious decision because I read a lot of erotica, although I’ve never, to this day, seen a porno movie which people tease me about, especially my students. Pornography, even before its accessibility through social media, has always been available. That I have never watched a porno movie is an exception among my friends, and now particularly among my students who view pornography, along with sex tapes and erotic selfies, as commonplace. I decided that what was off putting, at least for me when I was reading erotica, was the description of how people felt and smelled and touched each other. And I thought, What if I just leave all that out. It seemed soft to me, slightly squishy.

 

As it turns out it was a fortuitous choice, because the result was that it allowed people to more easily imagine what was happening and to fantasise. The blankness of it, although I’m very specific about what’s happening, allows people, particularly women, to enter into it. It allows the reader to supply his or her own memories, sensations, observations and sensuous responses – smelling, hearing, all that – from their own sexual experience. They could then transfer it, or transpose it. I had no idea that would happen.

^A

SUSANNA MOORE

— Well, it’s different now than when it was written. It was published in 1995, more than 20 years ago. There were certain taboos – female masturbation being one of them. There is still very little written about female masturbation. It’s as if it doesn’t exist. Or shouldn’t exist.

 

The tone of the book was deliberately shocking. I had just written the three Hawaiian books, which now seem to me very young, a little eager to please, a little soft. I had begun to be known as a woman’s writer, my subjects children and motherhood, which I found limiting.

 

So In the Cut was very deliberate. There hadn’t been a lot of erotic writing about women that was not devised as either pornography or perversion, like The Story of O {the 1954 erotic novel about a woman whose submission to her lover becomes more extreme as the book progresses}. I thought, Well, I want to write about sex, although I didn’t know how I was going to do that. I read a lot of pornography in the hope of at least discovering what not to do. That seemed to work. When the book was published, I  received letters from women who said they wish they’d been warned about the book as they had orgasms in public places, on airplanes for example, which of course made me laugh although I’m not sure I believed them.

 

I think the book now has a following because women are allowed, if not encouraged to speak up about sexual aggression and harassment. What it is to be a sexual being. Franny’s openness about her sexuality can be inspiring for women.

 

It’s not unlike Miss Aluminum in that way. In both books, there are no apologies, which was intentional on my part. I think that gives women a kind of assurance about themselves. But In the Cut is very, very dark, even aside from the ending. I’ve worked almost all my life as a volunteer – I’ve worked in a women’s prison and a women’s shelter. And of course I was very aware of the statistics about male violence against women, so the book is also enraged. The message it conveys is that they’re going to get you either way. If you wear hot pants into a bar – they’re going to get you. If you sit at home with your cat, and you never go out – they’re going to get you.

 

One day I was riding in a police car with two New York detectives who noticed that I was anxious. I told them that my daughter was late walking home from school and that I was worried that something had happened to her. I said that she was very pretty and tended to attract attention. They said, ‘The most rape cases we deal with are old women who live alone and are attacked in an elevator on the stairs of their building. Not pretty girls on the street.’ That shocked me, and was a lesson.

^A

SUSANNA MOORE

— The other thing is that I changed over the course of writing it, and as I got older. When I was young I was extremely defiant of the rules imposed on women – don’t go to the motorcycle bar in hot pants, be careful, don’t go to a man’s apartment, don’t flirt with strangers, don’t hitchhike. It so angered me that in fact I did all those things, and quite deliberately, and at some risk, and sometimes found myself in danger. My attitude would have been: Don’t tell me what to do, it’s not my fault if you rape me, it’s yours. As time went on, I adopted a much more cautious view. I felt that women did have to accommodate the culture, for their own safety, as much as it might infuriate them. If men were killing and raping and harassing women, women had to take steps to prevent it, rather than to defy it.

 

As I was writing Miss Aluminum, I kept a list in my head of the people to whom I wished to apologise. All of them men, of course. I don’t think I have ever behaved particularly badly to other women, but certainly to men, I behaved in ways that that were perhaps not as wise or as kind as they might have been. And then I realised that most of the men on the list were dead. So, I am left with my regret, which is something that I tend to cherish anyway. I certainly would not apologise to Oleg {Cassini, the fashion designer. Cassini raped Moore when she was 21, while she was modelling for him at a runway show in New York}. It’s not that I would necessarily have done things differently, although I wish I’d done them better.

^A

SUSANNA MOORE

— In its most elemental sense, I think it meant not being a girl, not being female. As a teenager, I was very outspoken, always speaking my mind, sometimes being thrown out of class. All of that was a kind of bravery, certainly defiance, and a refusal to be intimidated. There was a story I left out in the memoir, about one of my teachers in Honolulu, who was very kind to me – an English teacher. When I was sent to my grandmother in Philadelphia after graduation, he followed me, showing up one afternoon at my grandmother’s little house. He took me to dinner. I wasn’t fully aware – although I should have been, I was 17 – that he was in love. He behaved very well and soon returned to Honolulu. A friend wondered why I had left that story out of the book, and in part it was because despite my defiance, despite my awareness that being a girl was not all that it should have been, it was really men who saved me – men who behaved in ways that were unwise but whose friendship was lifesaving for me.

^A

SUSANNA MOORE

— It’s interesting, thinking about the turmoil and distress that is occurring here and in other countries over what some of my friends – liberal friends – say might be false accusations that ruin men’s lives. Professors who are dismissed without evidence or more than an accusation of wrongdoing. They complain that women are not taking responsibility – again, Why did you go to the apartment? Why after he put his hand up your dress, did you go to dinner with him? Why did you send him those emails? I of course understand why. After all, I showed up for work with Oleg Cassini and later was in a movie for which he designed the clothes. There is a backlash now, which I think is occasionally valid, although often disregarding of complexity. What did she think was going to happen? Why didn’t she just tell him to fuck off and never talk to him again? 

^A

SUSANNA MOORE

— First of all, because there was so little to do in any commercial sense that reading became a means not only of escape, but a way to experience the world. Reading was entertainment, as well as a way to be alone. Books were an enormous part of my life as a child, and my brothers and sisters were readers too.

 

When I first went to the American South, following the Mississippi River because I was obsessed with the writing of William Faulkner, I immediately noticed certain similarities between my childhood in Hawaii and that of the South. One of them, the social and cultural disparity between whites and non-whites, but also the sense that there was a secret life just below the surface. Black life, African-American life in which everything that was of interest to me could be found: food, music, dance, expressive language. Even a kind of defiance and animation and energy. I was interested by that.

 

I had a certain confidence in childhood that there was not much a boy could do that I couldn’t do as well. This was a tremendous advantage, even if a short-lived assumption, and gave me a confidence that I might not otherwise have had if I had been limited to playing with dolls.

^A

SUSANNA MOORE

— What I saw as I was writing, and that other people noticed and brought to my attention as well, was how, for someone who was so defiant and obsessed with courage, I was willing or maybe even needed life to happen to me, rather than my causing it happen. I hesitate to use the word passive because I don’t think I was passive, yet I became aware when I was writing the book of a certain ease, a certain willingness to let life happen to me, combined with good fortune. Perhaps the word ‘passive’ is the right one, although I must feel a little guilty about being passive, or a little confused by it, because I attribute this behaviour to something else: an inability to anticipate the future, since everything could change in a profound, destructive way, in a moment, like my mother’s death. I had no plan, no goal. Even now, I live in expectation of imminent disaster, if not death, a fear which drives my daughter to distraction. If I don’t hear from her for a few days or she doesn’t send me a photograph of the children, I’m convinced they’re dead. It’s completely irrational, I know that, which makes my anxiety worse… She knows very well how I think so sometimes she’ll leave a message: ‘Mother, I’m not dead, the children are fine, I’ll talk to you tomorrow.’ Our mother’s death was very traumatic for me and my brothers and sisters. My adult life does not make much sense, nor do my books, if you don’t know that.

^A

SUSANNA MOORE

— Of course I idolised her like everybody else, although I had begun to have certain suspicions that she wasn’t that smart. I was around her quite a bit because she was living at Connie’s and I was at Connie’s almost every day. She was wonderful, but not particularly quick. I was expecting someone more profound, someone who would share her illuminating experiences with me. I was a bit naive.

 

I hadn’t really thought about it until now, but you could make the critical argument that the book {Miss Aluminium} consists of the lessons I learned growing up and as a young woman. Another lesson was learned when my grandmother sent me off to the ball in Philadelphia dressed like a princess. {Moore writes: ‘When I walked into the crowded, noisy ballroom… I saw that a terrible mistake had been made. Animated young women, tousled and tanned blondes in strapless, short, colourful dresses were already dancing.’}

^A

SUSANNA MOORE

— We didn’t know anything of… high society. Only what we gleaned from magazines and movies, which had little to do with our more prosaic, certainly modest experience of the world. Later, when I worked at Bergdorf’s dressed in {a wealthy neighbour} Mrs. Kaiser’s very expensive clothes, people thought I was a rich girl, when in fact I couldn’t afford lunch. I learned then that clothes are a disguise, and sometimes a misdirection.

^A

SUSANNA MOORE

— I suppose I was hoping that she would tell me something revelatory, what it was like to be Audrey Hepburn. I don’t think she had any idea.