Behind the Book: A Guest Post by Jennifer Haigh
A story of sisterhood, secrets and complicated family mythologies, Jennifer Haigh takes readers on a trip to Shanghai, where bonds are tested and old truths come to light. Read on for an exclusive essay from Jennifer on what inspired her to write Rabbit Moon.
Hardcover
$26.00
$29.00
Rabbit Moon: A Novel (Barnes & Noble Book Club Edition)
Rabbit Moon: A Novel (Barnes & Noble Book Club Edition)
In Stock Online
Hardcover
$26.00
$29.00
A tense, propulsive drama set in Shanghai, about a fractured American family, secret lives, and the unbreakable bond between two sisters, from the New York Times bestselling author of Mercy Street
A tense, propulsive drama set in Shanghai, about a fractured American family, secret lives, and the unbreakable bond between two sisters, from the New York Times bestselling author of Mercy Street
In the wee hours of a Sunday morning, in the financial district of Shanghai, a young American woman is found unresponsive on the sidewalk, knocked unconscious by a hit and run driver. That’s the setup for Rabbit Moon – a novel that was itself an accident, a story I never intended to write.
Here’s what happened. In the summer of 2016, I traveled to China on a writing fellowship. I planned to spend the time working on a project I’d started back in Boston, the first draft of a novel that would become Mercy Street. I saw quickly that it wasn’t possible. I’d been living in Boston for fourteen years; now, suddenly, I could hardly remember what it looked like. Shanghai demanded my full attention. I didn’t want to be anywhere else.
The city was an astonishment – a vast, vibrant megalopolis that overwhelmed my senses and lit up my brain. More than any place I’d ever experienced, it made me want to write.
I lived on the seventeenth floor of a modern building that contained both apartments and offices: an acupuncture clinic, a dance studio, a hair salon. Over time I began to recognize certain people who lived or worked there. Unable to speak the language, I became a keen observer of the life happening all around me. The building manager, the handsome young hairstylist, the tall foreign girl in the lace dress: Each had a story I would never know.
In my imagination, the girl in the lace dress became Lindsey, a young American woman who spends a college gap year teaching English in China. I gave her the superpower I so desperately wanted, an unusual facility with languages and near-fluency in Chinese. I wrote about her complicated, fractured family, her troubled and troubling past.
Unlike any other book I’ve written, Rabbit Moon was composed almost entirely in public spaces — parks, tea houses, train stations, restaurants. Though I couldn’t understand a word anyone was saying, being surrounded by people made me feel less alone. Over time, the city itself became a character in the story. Rabbit Moon is a snapshot of a particular moment in its history – dynamic, cosmopolitan, newly wealthy. In 2016, Shanghai Disney had just opened. There was a constant influx of tourists and students, a huge number of business travelers, rural migrants from less-prosperous parts of China. And in the midst of it all was my character, Lindsey Litvak.
To me, a novel begins with a moment after which nothing will ever be the same. For Lindsey and her family, the hit-and-run accident is that moment. When her parents are notified, they do what any of us would do. They get on a plane to Shanghai.
When I’m writing a novel, I don’t think about plot so much as causality –how one thing leads to another, how the experiences we’ve already lived make us who we are. In Rabbit Moon the causality goes backward and forward: the consequences of this terrible accident, but also
the chain of events that brought Lindsey to Shanghai in the first place, the betrayal that shattered her family and changed the course of her life. It’s a story about the hinge between past and future, a meditation on causality and chance.
