REVIEW:
The Eighth Moon

Runestone, volume 11

REVIEW:
The Eighth Moon

Runestone, volume 11

Reviewed by Lindsey Hypatia

— 

The Eighth Moon is a memoir not focused on the author, Jennifer Kabat, but on the land around her. Kabat moved to the Catskills of New York State in 2005, with her husband David, after being told she was allergic to the city of London. Immersing herself in the natural landscape of her town of Margaretville, Jennifer uncovers the history of the Anti-Rent War from the 1830s and 1840s. The Anti-Rent War was an uprising against landlords in upstate New York to resist unjust eviction and tax collection. Tenants disguised themselves and would arrive at neighbors’ houses to scare away lawyers and law enforcement, banding together to protect their homeland. Rather than a neat chronological book, this memoir is a knotted essay that begins to loosen as the author pulls at strands. 

The form and shape of this book do not follow conventional memoir structures, instead operating on a cyclical narrative. Kabat struggles with the dark past of the town and the rise of hate politics in the present all while trying to maintain the environment from the influence of New York City. The timeline is not consecutive, but neither is history. Jennifer weaves the past and present together tightly, bundling the Anti-Rent War of the 19th century with the 2008 recession and the Covid-19 pandemic. Dates are often omitted, forcing the reader to pay attention to the historical events and details of seasons changing.

Besides timeline and narrative, Kabat brings in unique characters from different backgrounds united by their shared love of nature and Margaretville. She carefully crafts these people for the public eye, maintaining their humanity while showing their flaws, such as Rudd and Muriel. Rudd and Muriel not only serve as parental figures to Jennifer and her husband but are used as a craft device to tie characters past and present together. Kabat writes, “My neighbors were and are the poor white people oppressed by elites often based in the city. They also tied their oppression to others, supporting abolition and suffrage. They are like Trump’s supporters and are socialists like me, believing not in I, but us, a coalition together.” Alongside the present neighbors, she gives us historical characters like Moses Earle who “compared to his neighbors, … is wealthy. He owns half his farm and still he is poor. It is not worth the money to paint the house or barn when the premises are not yours, not really.” It is Moses Earle’s farm where the undersheriff Osman Steele is shot and the Anti-Rent War is concluded, at least for a time as Kabat shows us. 

Tenses are always changing, from past to present to future while also inviting the reader to sit with the author in these moments, writing, “Now picture the scene. On the land it is dusk, summer. The tent is high on the hill and we – you, David, and I, walk down through the field.” Kabat incorporates us in the story, letting us sit in the tent together in these intimate moments. The reader is a character in this memoir when Kabat writes “we.” She tells us, “We, you and I, walk up to the end of my dead-end road, and it is not dead at all. We slip past the gate of the Sanford farm where Warren Scudder ‘staid the night.’” 

The Eighth Moon is unique not only because the author is not the main character in her memoir, but because it doesn’t follow chronological order. Archival figures are reanimated and the narrative is molded around them, rather than trying to force them into the present. History is interconnected with land and Kabat emphasizes the memory of the environment, encouraging us to look at the archives of our own towns and the neighbors of the past.