The Eighth Moon: A Memoir of Belonging and Rebellion

"Beautifully written, The Eighth Moon uses a very light touch to probe the most essential, unresolvable questions of belief, kinship, fidelity, history, identity" (Chris Kraus).

When an ongoing illness refuses to resolve, Jennifer Kabat returns from London to Margaretville--a rural village in the Catskill Mountains, not far from where she grew up. As her body heals, she discovers meadows dotted with milkweed in bloom, saffron orange salamanders, grackles nesting in arborvitae, ash trees marked with orange blazes, a blood moon. Small patches of land begin to hold glimpses of the past--and of what is yet to come. "I feel, too, all the other people on the land, beating and breathing into this moment with me."

As her life in Margaretville expands, Kabat comes to know her socialist yet conservative neighbors and reflects on her unconventional upbringing, including the progressive politics her parents instilled in her at a young age. She also comes to find that the history of this region is steeped in trauma. Once home to merciless land barons who bound tenants to the land in perpetuity, Upstate New York--her very street--was the site of the Anti-Rent War of the 1800s, in which tenants revolted and blood was shed. Connectedness abounds in Kabat's way of seeing: the former revolution and the political conditions of today, a wax plant that mysteriously ebbs and flows with her mother's declining health and eventual passing. "Grief is strange," she says. "Time blurs. The dead are alive and present."

"Kabat is both a stylist and a temporal magician," (Adrian Shirk). Ambitious and expertly threaded, The Eighth Moon is at once a search for how to live in a place and an enigmatic lesson in a new kind of seeing--one where everything is connected, and all at once.