Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury

by Honor Moore Narrated by Honor Moore

Overview

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.



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 writing, 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.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"A dazzling, epic portrait of a fascinating American family."— Sigrid Nunez

"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 New York Times Book Review

"[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."— O, The Oprah Magazine

"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."— Rosanna Warren Literary Matters

"A sharp portrait of two women who struggled to shape their lives as their world changed.… A deeply insightful, empathetic family history."— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"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.… [A] rich exploration of an individual whose life and family were dramatically altered by second-wave feminism."— Library Journal

"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, National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Negroland

"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, via the Birchbark Books Instagram

"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, author of Memories of the Future

"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, author of The Impeachers

Kirkus Reviews

★ 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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177336626
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	03/10/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged

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