Haystack Book Festival. Brendan Gill Memorial Lecture: Susanna Moore
Date: 09/29/2023
Time: 6:00 pm-7:00 pm
Susanna Moore is the author of several novels, including In the Cut, Sleeping Beauties, and The Whiteness of Bones, and four books of nonfiction. Her most recent book, The Lost Wife: A Novel, is an immersive, brilliantly subversive historical novel, inspired by a true story.
In the summer of 1855, Sarah Brinton abandons her husband and child to make the long and difficult journey from Rhode Island to Minnesota Territory, where she plans to reunite with a childhood friend. When she arrives at a small frontier post on the edge of the prairie without family or friends and with no prospect of work or money, she quickly remarries and has two children. Anticipating unease and hardship at the Indian Agency, where her husband Dr. John Brinton is the new resident physician, Sarah instead finds acceptance and kinship among the Sioux women at a nearby reservation. The Sioux tribes, however, are wary of the white settlers and resent the rampant theft of their land. Promised payments by the federal government are never made, and starvation and disease soon begin to decimate their community. Tragically and inevitably, this leads to the Sioux Uprising of 1862. Intimate and raw, The Lost Wife is a searing tale of a seminal and shameful moment in America’s conquest of the West.
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The annual Haystack Book Festival, a program of the Norfolk Foundation, brings together writers and thinkers to explore new ideas in literature and the arts.