Our Revolution

“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

“Honor Moore’s vivid, compassionate, scrupulously honest portrait of her mother, Jenny McKean, a child of spectacular wealth and privilege, whose life took her far beyond the comforts of her insular world, 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 What I Loved

“In Moore’s supremely capable hands, what began as a labor of love and filial duty expands into a dazzling epic portrait of a fascinating American family and a mother-daughter story unlike any other. A superb feat of empathetic imagination and meticulous historical reconstruction, full of drama, passion, and the deepest wisdom.”

—Sigrid Nunez, National Book Award–winning
author of The Friend

“Our Revolution is a tour de force of a memoir, one that describes Honor Moore’s upper-crust background and difficult relationship with her mother with equal parts tenderness and rigor. It will have something to say to anyone who has wondered at the mysteries of family lineage and the vexed journey to becoming an individual while holding on to a larger identity as a sibling and daughter.”

—Daphne Merkin, author of This Close to Happy

“In Our Revolution, Honor Moore tells a story of mothers and daughters that has not been told before. Jenny Moore was an Episcopal bishop’s wife, the mother of nine, and a child of privilege whose vibrancy and generous spirit drew people to her. But she was also a writer. The revolutionary insight of this remarkable book arises from the discovery that for Jenny and Honor, turning into their writer selves was also a turning to each other as truly mother and daughter. Gripping and profoundly moving, Our Revolution is also a signal contribution to feminism.”

—Carol Gilligan, coauthor of Why Does Patriarchy Persist?