The Eighth Moon: A Memoir of Belonging and Rebellion

by Jennifer Kabat

“Beautifully written, The Eighth Moon uses a very light touch to probe the most essential, unresolvable questions of belief, kinship, fidelity, history, and identity.”—Chris Kraus

"1845. The sky is blue, yet all is brown. I picture the scene from a silvered steel of violence, blood, beer, whiskey, and mutton. High, skidding clouds skip with excitement, eager to see what unfolds below. They cheer on the scene where men in dresses march."

A rebellion, guns, and murder. When Jennifer Kabat moves to the Catskills in 2005, she has no idea it was the site of the Anti-Rent War, an early episode of American rural populism. Prompted to leave London following a mysterious illness that seems to be caused by life in the city itself, she finds in these ancient mountains—at once the northernmost part of Appalachia and a longtime refuge for New Yorkers—a place "where the land itself holds time."

She forges friendships with her new neighbors and explores the countryside on logging roads and rutted lanes, finding meadows dotted with milkweed in bloom, saffron salamanders, a blood moon rising over Munsee, Oneida, and Mohawk land. As the Great Recession sets in and a housing crisis looms, she supports herself with freelance work and adjunct teaching, slowly learning of the 1840s uprising, when poor tenant farmers fought to redistribute their landlords' vast estates. In the farmers’ socialist dreams, she discovers connections to her parents’ collectivist values, as well as to our current moment. Threaded with historical documents, the natural world, and the work of writers like Adrienne Rich and Elizabeth Hardwick, Kabat weaves a capacious memoir, where the past comes alive in the present.

Rich with unexpected correspondences and discoveries, this visionary and deeply compassionate debut gives us a new way of seeing and being in place—one in which everything is intertwined and all at once.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, History

276 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 7, 2024

About the author

Jennifer Kabat is an essayist and novelist. Her essays are sweeping histories that interleave socialism, modernism and science with her own longing for a way to understand socialism and democracy today. Included in Best American Essays, her writing has also appeared in McSweeney’s, BOMB, The New York Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, Granta and The White Review, among others. She frequently writes for Frieze and has contributed to artists’ monographs and museum catalogues including London’s Victoria & Albert museum.

Reviews

[brigitte]

what i liked:
- learning some of the radical history of an area close to where my parents live and where i now spend some time
- the author's reconsidering of linear time to intertwine local history with her own life and her use of anti-linear narrative to defy capitalist "progress"

what didn't work as much:
- some aspects felt a little half baked and erred slightly on the side of political platitudes. sometimes this half-bakedness was ok because it was an exposition of nuance, subjectivity, a lack of black and white, etc but sometimes things just felt under-probed
- more than a few typos

[Philip Marsh · Rating 5 out of 5]

A radical history of radical history, and a timely reminder that the past can both haunt the present and inspire change in the future.

[Kyle D. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm gasping, it's so wonderful. Beautiful and complex and true and hard and exactly what I needed to read these days. I'm jealous to my core, inspired to blend history and present in new ways, boundaries erased.

[Diana Arterian · Rating 5 out of 5]

A nuanced and textured approach to communal radicalism of past and present, Kabat describes the mind-bending (for a contemporary reader) rent war in which men put on dresses and masks to remain unknown when they came together to protect vulnerable people in their community. She thoughtfully weaves in her parents' own radical political efforts, the ways in which Kabat herself attempts to express her own as a city person who has moved to the region where this rent war took place in almost two centuries ago. Reading this at a time when we feel more divided than ever and those most supported by the capitalist system are venerated and protected, learning of the ways in which community members of the past and present support one another was moving.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wrote this review once and then, poof, vanished.

Raw, unresolved, probably eternal. Ethereal from page one, but not so sticky that it's impossible to follow. A memoir that situates itself in the radical free land movements of the nineteenth century but, like Walter Benjamin would have it (first citation in the Notes section), is ever present as well. Makes for a really interesting read, where history of popular discontent over time collapses in on itself.

Good, unexpected,and gorgeously written. Very strong read to put into early 2025.

[Owen Hatherley · Rating 4 out of 5]

The USA is full of places where there were once radical communes or insurgent social movements that are now full of people aggressively demanding their own oppression, and this is a fine elliptical book on coming to live in one of those places and what it means to have that history around you - much more forgiving and public spirited than I'm making it sound.

[Sophie · Rating 3 out of 5]

There was definitely an agenda in this book. More than one. I don't know shit about politics so I can't really comment on that stuff though. The entire book read like opinion pieces at a new york journalism website. Not bad if you're in the mood for that kinda thing, but its definitely a very particular mood. lol I liked all the pictures in it, gave it nostalgia vibes at times.

[Katherine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Notes on phone. Found this frustrating structurally and with the heavy use of the memoir-I POV despite being so clearly within my research interests.