Susanna Moore

Susanna Moore (born December 9, 1945) is an American writer and teacher. Born in Pennsylvania but raised in Hawaii, Moore worked as a model and script reader in Los Angeles and New York City before beginning her career as a writer. Her first novel, My Old Sweetheart, published in 1982, earned a PEN Hemingway nomination, and won the Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She followed this with The Whiteness of Bones in 1989, and her third novel, Sleeping Beauties, in 1993. All three of these novels were set in Hawaii and charted dysfunctional family relationships.

Moore gained particular critical notice for her fourth novel, In the Cut (1995), which marked a departure from her previous works in both setting and content, concerning an English professor in New York City who has a sexual affair with a detective investigating violent murders and dismemberments in her neighborhood. It was adapted into a 2003 feature film of the same name by director Jane Campion.

Biography Moore was born December 9, 1945, in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Shortly after her birth, her family relocated to Hawaii, where she spent her formative years, and attended the Punahou School in Honolulu. She is the oldest of seven children, and was raised by her widower father, a physician; her mother died in her childhood.

At the age of 17, Moore returned to the mainland United States to live in Philadelphia with her grandmother. She later lived in New York City and Los Angeles, working as a model and script reader. She published her first book, My Old Sweetheart, in 1982, followed by The Whiteness of Bones in 1989, and Sleeping Beauties in 1993—all three novels, set in her home state of Hawaii, dealt with themes of familial dysfunction. For My Old Sweetheart, Moore earned a PEN Hemingway nomination, and won the Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. and in 2006 she received a Fellowship in Literature from the Asian Cultural Council, which entailed a three-month fellowship to research on the Meiji Period in Japan.

Moore was a visiting lecturer in Creative Writing at Yale University in 1988, 1989 and 1994; visiting lecturer at New York Graduate School in 1995; creative writing teacher at the Metropolitan Detention Center, Brooklyn between 2004 and 2006; and lecturer of creative writing at Princeton University between 2007 and 2009. During May to August 2009, Moore was Writer-in-Residence at Australia's University of Adelaide. As of a 2012 interview, Moore resided in her home state of Hawaii, though she returns to the East Coast each year to teach courses at Princeton University for the fall semester.

Moore has a daughter, Lulu, with production designer and art director Richard Sylbert, and later lived with Michael Laughlin.

Publications Fiction My Old Sweetheart (1982) The Whiteness of Bones (1989) Sleeping Beauties (1993) In the Cut (1995) One Last Look (2003) The Big Girls (2007) The Life of Objects (2012) The Lost Wife (2023)

Non-fiction I Myself Have Seen It: The Myth of Hawai‘i (2003) Paradise of the Pacific: Approaching Hawai‘i (2015) Miss Aluminum: A Memoir (2020)