The Dragons, the Giant, the Women: A Memoir

"This is the one I was thinking of when I talked about formal innovation. This is Moore’s debut memoir—her previous book was a novel with elements of magical realism. She doesn’t let categories of literature bother her. That’s a good thing. The whole first part of the book is written in what I would call a voice of innocence: it’s her five-year-old self explaining the civil war in the terms she saw it at the time. She thought that the bad men were dragons, the giant is her father. She perceived the situation in these mythic terms, because those kind of stories were her only reference to make sense of what was happening. And some chapters are almost like lyric essays, letting us into her stream of consciousness. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . You’ve got 100 pages of this stuff. Then you turn the page and it’s like, boom, she’s on Tinder in Brooklyn trying to get a date. It’s just so unexpected. I love that. So it’s not just about the heartbreak of war, it’s also about the heartbreak of romance. But she keeps alive through the whole book this question that you have in your head from the beginning. When the war breaks out, her mother is in the United States. They’re running away from their home barefoot into the woods, and she has no idea if or how her mother will ever find them. Because the whole country is so severely dislocated, it’s a real question: how would anyone find anyone? She withholds the answer to the question to the end of the book, which creates great narrative momentum. Then, at that point, she switches into the first-person voice of her mother. This is very rarely seen in memoir—if ever. Some people would say, well, now it’s not a memoir. It’s autofiction , or just plain old fiction . But no, it’s published as memoir. I was thrilled with the device, that she didn’t feel she had to follow some unwritten rules of memoir. I don’t think she saw anything wrong with jumping into the first-person voice of her mother. This makes it an important and liberating book for people who want to write memoirs themselves. I’ve already taught it in one of my classes in the MFA program at the University of Baltimore."