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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, 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 Threaded with historical documents, the natural world, and the work of writers like Adrienne Rich and Elizabeth Hardwick, Kabat weaves a capacious memoir, where the past comes alive in the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.
"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.
- GenresMemoirNonfictionHistory
304 pages, Paperback
Published May 7, 2024
About the author
Jennifer Kabat
7 books17 followersJennifer 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.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
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January 6, 2025what 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
- 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
July 9, 2024
A radical history of radical history, and a timely reminder that the past can both haunt the present and inspire change in the future.
January 29, 2025
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.
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.
July 26, 2024
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.
August 3, 2026
Jennifer Kabat's marvelous THE EIGHTH MOON is the gorgeously written and structured first volume in a memoir diptych about home, land, and belonging in the Catskills that reads like a cross between two of my favorite books, Sebald's THE RINGS OF SATURN and Jean Craighead George's MY SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN (which Kabat's also written about!). It's full of politics, ecology, and the delicate work of building homes and friendships, against the Catskills' long histories of tenant farming, the NYC water system, and, prominently, the relationship between the 1839-1845 Anti-Rent War and contemporary politics, through anti-capitalism, socialism, collectivism, and rural/urban connections, echoing Benjamin on fragments of the past and "the spark of hope":
"Progress undermines radical histories. They always fail as if there are winners and losers and those pasts are over. As if those movements are not present here all along.
To reconsider time is to write against this. Without linear time, those revolutions are alive. They all offer propositions that are unfinished and here for us to take up. They cut across these years, and we can gather them together."
It's a great personal, familial, and cultural history of belonging, on all levels: Kabat writes that lichens "are a cooperative ecosystem, fungi and algae joined as one, spreading on rocks and trees. On Clum's apple trees they spiral out in a circle called a green shield. The partners, the algae and fungi, each work together to gain water and nutrients from the atmosphere, from rain and dust.... The word lichen comes from the Greek, to lick. I think again, I bought the soil. I eat the soil through these lichen as the organism connects rocks and earth. It connects me to the ground here....
And the soil remembers. Dig into it with a spade, you see roots tangled under the surface. It's limned with delicate fine filaments. My heart breaks, tearing into them. The ground takes years to recover. Soils hold the history of a place, and around Clum's foundations nettles and gooseberries grow. By the barn's grand stone walls, jack-in-the-pulpits spread."
As a POC who grew up in a conservative small town, I'd have liked more contradictions in the talk about property ownership in a gentrifying region and the desire for belonging amongst Trump voters; maybe these get discussed more in the second volume. But overall this is one of the most beautifully written, satisfying books I've read in the past several years. Thank you!
"Progress undermines radical histories. They always fail as if there are winners and losers and those pasts are over. As if those movements are not present here all along.
To reconsider time is to write against this. Without linear time, those revolutions are alive. They all offer propositions that are unfinished and here for us to take up. They cut across these years, and we can gather them together."
It's a great personal, familial, and cultural history of belonging, on all levels: Kabat writes that lichens "are a cooperative ecosystem, fungi and algae joined as one, spreading on rocks and trees. On Clum's apple trees they spiral out in a circle called a green shield. The partners, the algae and fungi, each work together to gain water and nutrients from the atmosphere, from rain and dust.... The word lichen comes from the Greek, to lick. I think again, I bought the soil. I eat the soil through these lichen as the organism connects rocks and earth. It connects me to the ground here....
And the soil remembers. Dig into it with a spade, you see roots tangled under the surface. It's limned with delicate fine filaments. My heart breaks, tearing into them. The ground takes years to recover. Soils hold the history of a place, and around Clum's foundations nettles and gooseberries grow. By the barn's grand stone walls, jack-in-the-pulpits spread."
As a POC who grew up in a conservative small town, I'd have liked more contradictions in the talk about property ownership in a gentrifying region and the desire for belonging amongst Trump voters; maybe these get discussed more in the second volume. But overall this is one of the most beautifully written, satisfying books I've read in the past several years. Thank you!
January 30, 2025
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.
December 15, 2024
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.
April 20, 2025
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.
March 31, 2025
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.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews