Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury

by Honor Moore

Overview

A daughter’s memoir of her mother evolves beautifully into a narrative of the far-reaching changes in women’s lives in the twentieth century.

With the sweep of an epic novel, Our Revolution follows Jenny Moore, a charismatic and brilliant woman whose life changed as she became engaged in the great twentieth-century movements for peace and social justice. Born into Boston society in 1923 and the first woman in her family to go to college, she set aside writing ambitions to marry Paul Moore, a decorated war hero who became Bishop Paul Moore. Together they had nine children—"I wanted a baseball team," Jenny said, "or a small orchestra."

Rejecting a conventional path, the Moores moved to an inner-city parish in Jersey City and began their family while collaborating on a socially radical, multiracial ministry. In 1968, Jenny published her first book. "Everything was just starting," she protested—meaning an independent life inspired in part by the new feminist movement—when she was diagnosed with cancer at fifty.

Jenny bequeathed to her eldest daughter, Honor, then a twenty-seven-year-old poet, her unfinished writing. As Honor pursued her own career as a writer, she was haunted by her mother’s bequest. Decades later, she delves into Jenny’s pages and forges a new relationship with the passionate seeker and truth teller she finds there. Our Revolution is a vivid, absorbing account of two women navigating the twentieth century and a daughter’s story of the mother who shaped her life as an artist and a woman.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393080056
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	03/10/2020
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Honor Moore is the author of two previous memoirs in A Daughter’s Family Trilogy—The Bishop’s Daughter, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The White Blackbird, a New York Times Notable Book—as well as a play and three collections of poems. She lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

Prologue: A Bequest 1

I Fretwork 15

II The Diana Cup 53

III Persuasion 101

IV Size of a Coconut 135

V A Baby under One Arm, a Cabbage in the Other 177

VI An Institution 227

VII First-Person Singular 277

VIII Our Revolution 325

Acknowledgments 385

Notes 389

Photographs 399

Editorial Reviews

12/09/2019

Poet and playwright Moore (The Bishop’s Daughter) pays tribute to her mother, Jenny, a social activist and writer who died from cancer in 1973 at age 50, in a touching but overlong memoir. Throughout, she examines Jenny’s emotionally turbulent life and strained marriage to Paul Moore Jr., a prominent bishop of the Episcopal Church, and explores the mother-daughter bond. Moore uses excerpts from her mother’s private papers to tell the story: “It was time to pull the pages of her writing from their cartons,” she says. “It was time to get to know my mother.” The narrative spans WWII, the postwar boom years, and the civil rights and women’s liberation movements, and covers Jenny’s domestic and professional lives and the births of her nine children; Paul’s religious career and the couple’s efforts to establish a diverse church; and Jenny’s late-in-life quest for independence after she became aware of Paul’s bisexuality (her mother never did “reveal those suspicions to any of her children.... I consider her heroic”). Moore writes about trying to get close to her busy mother, and speculates about why she had so many kids (“motherhood was an arena in which to excel as a competitor”). This is a languid document, at time overstuffed with detail, but one that nevertheless offers a poignant look at the complexities of motherhood and womanhood. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"The revolutionary insight of this remarkable book arises from the discovery that for Honor Moore and her mother, turning in to their writer selves was also a turning to each other. Gripping and profoundly moving, Our Revolution is also a signal contribution to feminism."

Carol Gilligan

"Our Revolution is a tour de force of a memoir, one that describes Honor Moore’s upper-crust background and difficult relationship with her mother with equal parts tenderness and rigor. It will have something to say to anyone who has wondered at the mysteries of family lineage and the vexed journey to becoming an individual while holding on to a larger identity as a sibling and daughter."

Daphne Merkin

"Our Revolution begins with the sudden, catastrophic death of a mother and ends only when that mother has been returned to vibrant, textured life by her memoirist and poet daughter. Here is that emergence, beautifully recorded, documented, and envisioned as feminist art and American history."

Margo Jefferson

"In Moore’s supremely capable hands, what began as a labor of love and filial duty expands into a dazzling epic portrait of a fascinating American family and a mother-daughter story unlike any other. A superb feat of empathetic imagination and meticulous historical reconstruction, full of drama, passion, and the deepest wisdom."

Sigrid Nunez

12/01/2019

Moore (The White Blackbird) takes on the ambitious task of distilling not just one life but two. The author recounts her mother's life and her own, especially amid social change movements of the 1960s. Moore represents a white family of considerable privilege, a fact that is acknowledged in the text but still limits the perspective. Moore shares intimate glimpses of her family life and coming-of-age story, beautifully integrating excerpts from her mother's writing among her own recollections and research. However, perhaps because it seeks to cover too much territory, the book sometimes struggles to remain engaging and at times gets bogged down by details. Overall, readers will catch the spirit of the story, but without a clear sense of the book's purpose and what comes next. VERDICT Moore offers a rich exploration of an individual whose life and family were dramatically altered by second-wave feminism. However, the account struggles with the dual tasks of being both biography and memoir and takes on more than it can satisfyingly deliver.—Sarah Schroeder, Univ. of Washington Bothell

Library Journal

★ 2019-11-10
A sharp portrait of two women who struggled to shape their lives as their world changed.

Poet Moore (The Bishop's Daughter, 2008, etc.), who has written perceptive, revelatory biographies of her father, Bishop Paul Moore, and maternal grandmother, painter Margarett Sargent, now focuses her attention on her mother, Jenny McKean (1923-1973). Based in part on an unfinished memoir that Jenny bequeathed to her, Moore also draws on letters, scrapbooks, and abundant interviews with family, Jenny's many friends, and lovers to create a sensitive portrait of a complex, contradictory woman. Born into great wealth, Jenny greatly enjoyed the "dinners and dances" of her debutante year, at the same time feeling stimulated by what she was learning at Vassar: comparative anthropology, for example, where, for the first time, she studied race, "an issue that would gather force and meaning for her and inform her moral and political thinking for the rest of her life." So did her marriage to Paul, also born into wealth, who had decided to become a priest. For both, the church offered a sense of meaning and mission. Jenny defied "the limitations of her role as a clergy wife," becoming an active partner in the couple's work in the slums of Jersey City, where they lived in near poverty and, influenced by the Christian radical Dorothy Day, threw themselves "into a life of service, away from the spiritual emptiness and lack of community in which they had grown up." Honor, the oldest of their nine children, competed for her mother's attention not only with her siblings, but also with her mother's consuming social and political engagement; as she grew up, Jenny desired to extricate herself from her roles as wife and mother and forge a new identity. By 1970, with women's liberation bursting into American culture, both the author and her mother "began to stumble toward new terms of engagement—as free women." For each of them, the stumbling exposed emotional wounds, and for Moore, the discovery of her mother's gift to her: "a kind of force within that never allows me to stay still."

A deeply insightful, empathetic family history.

Kirkus Reviews

"[Moore] evokes the turbulence of the women’s rights movement in this elegiac account of her mother’s trek from Social Register to social justice activist."

The Oprah Magazine O

"Honor Moore’s vivid, compassionate, scrupulously honest portrait of her mother deftly charts the complex entanglements of family love, need, and pain. But this memoir-biography is also an intimate history of the ideas and events that jolted America during the three decades that followed the Second World War. The gaping rifts of class, race, and sex that set the country on fire then are still burning. Our Revolution is a book about those times for our times."

Siri Hustvedt

"Searching.… The process of understanding a parent, perhaps like memoir writing, never ends. The writer and the child return repeatedly to a collection of fragments, rearranging and reconsidering them in the shifting light of age."

Janny Scott

"Our Revolution is the poignant book that Honor Moore was destined to write: a passionate biographical memoir that uncovers, almost five decades after her mother’s death, a tale of family, faith, and fortitude—and of human rights, religion, and women, of mothers and daughters struggling to find themselves and each other against a midcentury backdrop of tumultuous change, uncertainty, and abiding love. Compassionate, genuine, hard to put down, it’s also a tale for today, not to be missed."

Brenda Wineapple

"A monumental and loving excavation of a life so richly promising, and quenched so early.… It’s a victory of awareness and self-distancing, the task of writing in order to see the self.… [Moore] makes sense of a complex history and of complex and intimate relationships in clear, nuanced, and strategically paced prose. The culmination comes in the form of the mutual understanding she and her mother were granted, or rather, granted each other, through remarkable powers of moral imagination—in both women. The daughter writer has made her writer mother live again."

Literary Matters - Rosanna Warren

"Our Revolution, Honor Moore’s tender and unflinching portrait of her complex, privileged, wildly talented mother, has been my book companion for a week. I could not hope for better. Jenny McKean through her daughter’s eyes is a deeply loving presence. Moore seamlessly blends her own voice with her mother’s writings to create a compelling world of 1960s and ’70s male idealism that rested upon the invisible labor of women."

Louise Erdrich