'LONG BRIGHT RIVER' CHANGED LIZ MOORE’S LIFE. CAN 'THE GOD OF THE WOODS' DO IT AGAIN?
Liz Moore was a writer for a long time before Long Bright River. The wildly popular and critically loved 2020 thriller made her famous. Before that, she had written three other great books. But as The God of the Woods, her brilliant and gorgeous fifth book, is released today, she stands in a new place.
“I have a career as a novelist that I feel proud of, because I was definitely not an overnight success. I think a lot of people actually believe that Long Bright River was my first book based on what they say to me in person or reviews I read online, which is simultaneously frustrating and a sign of its success,” she says over lunch in Brooklyn, where the TV adaptation of Long Bright River is being filmed. Her 2007 book, The Words of Every Song, a collection of interconnected stories about the music world, was followed by the novels Heft and The Unseen World.
Moore, who is 41 and lives in Philadelphia, has been in many of the different places that a writer can land with a book. “It’s a great way to have a career as an author. I have zero expectations ever when a book comes out because I’ve seen both sides of it. My first three books saw the other side of it. With The God of the Woods, it feels like it has a nice tailwind from Long Bright River. But I also always feel completely emotionally prepared for it not to sell anything because I’ve seen that happen many times before. I think my goal from book to book, is just please let this book sell enough copies so that I can write another book, and that’s it.”
Both The God of the Woods and Long Bright River take a sharp eye to class and the relations between the insiders and the outsiders. In Long Bright River, we see how joining the police can instantly lift someone into the middle class and offer a more stable life, even if the trade offs can be grave. The 1975-set God of the Woods, focuses on the wealthy Van Laar family, whose money and supposed virtue allows them to lord over the small Adirondacks community in which they run a summer camp. “They’re this hyper wealthy family living a rarefied existence, having convinced themselves that they’ve done it all themselves, that they are self-reliant, that they didn’t need anybody else, when in fact they built the house compound on the back of the local people in the nearby community. But they don’t recognize that,” she says. That compound, the book’s setting, was given the name Self Reliance, something that Moore thought could have been the book’s title. “They think they want to breed self reliance for their children, but not that kind, only the kind that works for them.”
The Adirondacks are so familiar to Moore. It’s the area that her mother’s family is from and her family had a home that she would go back to as a child. She still goes there and she hopes her two kids can have the kind of mountain adventures that she had. The God of the Woods’ summertime, small town setting created three classes of people: the elite Van Laars and their friends, the town’s year-round working class community, and the Van Laars longtime, and the valued employees to whom they’ve conferred a bit of their power. The last group really fascinates Moore. “They represent characters who transcend, who can transmit messages between the two, and who function as outsiders in a different way,” she says. The tension between the different classes, as well as the always enjoyable summer camp setting, was a thrill for Moore to play with. “Throwing all of these class tiers together onto one preserve made for really interesting narrative tension, interesting character development,” she says. “I found it really pleasurable to throw everybody into the mix and just let them bounce off one another like electrons and see what would happen.”
Moore alludes to electrons because she always thought she’d be a scientist. Her father was one—for years he was the director of a nuclear medicine physics lab in Boston. “I grew up in and around his lab and knowing his colleagues and the postdocs who would come from the lab and the culture associated with science labs,” she says. But after Moore graduating from Framingham High School, she went to Barnard where she picked a science major and was miserable. “It was just a labor of love. No, not of love, it was labor period.” She switched to English, made up a few classes, and had a new path. (Her sister became a doctor.)
After college she lived in New York, where she got an MFA, played music, and worked a series of day jobs, including one at a West Village guitar store that helped inspire and inform The Words of Every Song. Next, in 2012, came the novel Heft, which was written over four years and got strong reviews. 2016’s The Unseen World was a bit of a down tick from Heft when it came to sales but got ecstatic reviews and was on a number of best books of the year lists. Publishing is a quirky business, Moore learned.
The Unseen World, about a little girl raised by a single father scientist and the found family that knit together from the series of different kind of people who pass through a lab, means something significant to Moore. “It remains one of the books that I love, because I there are people who have told me that it’s their favorite of my books. I have a special place in my heart for it because it was quite autobiographical in certain ways,” she says.
But Long Bright River was the big one, the one that got her on Good Morning America’s book club, Obama’s best books of 2020 list, and the New York Times best seller chart. It changed her life.
Moore is now balancing the promotion of The God of the Woods with her full-time job as director of the MFA program in Creative Writing at Temple University, writing, and being co-creator, co-writer, and executive producer on Peacock’s Long Bright River series. Nearly every week she is on the show’s Brooklyn set and travels back and forth between New York and Philadelphia, her luggage with her constantly. “I am arguably busier than I have ever been in my life,” she says. “I feel like I’m wearing three hats all the time, which I like. I thrive under pressure, but I also have a family and I have young kids in Philadelphia. It’s been really, really challenging just to figure out ways to divide up my time while not sacrificing the wellbeing of my family,” she says.
There’s potential for both The Unseen World and The God of the Woods to be adapted for film or TV and Moore has thoughts on how she could play things better. “If another one of those shows goes, I think I have to be better at timing so that I don’t ever have three jobs at once again,” she says. “But I think there’s ways to do it. I have mentors in the industry who have really figured out a way to make a life that feels more balanced. This past spring was the experiment and I would say it was a failed experiment, in the sense that I just feel I can’t do this exact thing again in the future. Which I guess is a success to know that.”
When Moore moved from New York to Philadelphia, where her husband is from, she knew no one. Soon she had friends and then she had The Claw, a group for local writers that she co-founded with Carmen Maria Machado, whose past and present members include Kiley Reid and Emma Copley Eisenberg. It’s not about writing, it’s about solving the difficulties and mysteries of working as an author. “We don’t swap work, but we do go around and share what’s going on with us professionally or personally, whatever we feel,” Moore says. “We can ask a question of others, or we can ask for advice, or we can describe a difficult thing we’re facing in terms of writing or the industry. One of my favorite parts of living in Philadelphia is having that community.”
The writer’s life works for Moore. And it will continue to whether The God of the Woods gets the monster reception that Long Bright River did (I’m heavily betting that it will) or gets a well-received but muted response yet becomes a story that many are quietly changed by. “My goal from book to book, it’s just like, please let this book sell enough copies so that I can write another book, and that’s it,” she says. “I don’t actually love the process of writing, but I do experience a lot of catharsis from writing and publishing a book. I just want to always be able to do that. As long as The God of the Woods would sell well enough to let me publish a sixth book, I’ll be happy with it.”