Writing Hang Me the Moon

I wrote the first draft of Hang Me the Moon almost thirty years ago. Only later, when I read Writing a Woman’s Life by Carolyn Heilbrun, did I realize what I had done. I had written my way into a new life, “unconsciously and without recognizing or naming the process.” If I had named the process, I might have lost my nerve. But by the time I did so, it was too late. Fiction had become fact.

Even in that long-ago first draft, Hang Me the Moon was a künstlerroman, the story of an artist’s coming of age. Decades ago, James Joyce laid claim to this literary genre in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Hang Me the Moon makes the case for a portrait of the artist as a young woman. Her name is Phoebe Theos. And in 1973, in search of her self and her calling, she has come to “the magic mountain” of Charlottesville to study architecture at the University of Virginia. Moon has always focused on the intense friendship between Phoebe and a troubled classmate, Suzanne. As the two women seek self-definition with and through each other, they develop the kind of deep bond that only recently—in works like Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, and Claire Messud’s The Burning Girl—has been claimed by female as well as male characters.

Slower to surface in Moon were qualities that, thirty years ago, were largely off-limits to women, both in life and in literature: anger, ambition, and, as described by Heilbrun, “the open admission of the desire for power and control over one’s life.” Over time, as these traits asserted themselves, it became clear that Moon was not just a quest story, but “a woman’s quest for her own story,” one whose themes grew along with Phoebe.

Two of these themes—race and gender inequality—are as timely now as they were in the 1970s. Scenes involving Tuna, a major Black character, illuminate the poisonous discrimination that has festered for decades and erupted in 2020 with the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other Black Americans by police officers. The protests that followed spoke loud and clear: Black lives do matter. Likewise, the recent Me Too movement and ongoing struggles related to reproductive rights, economic inequality, and myriad issues make clear the relevance of Phoebe’s emerging self-awareness and empowerment to women in today’s world.

Regardless of Hang Me the Moon’s fate as it tries to escape my computer and make its way into the world, I am grateful for what it has done for me. Writing this novel changed my life. Perhaps reading it will do the same for others.