This was not an easy book,” Moore, 60, says from her Manhattan apartment. “I’m asking you to love this woman who has killed her children.” Amazingly, she succeeds. With its startling insights and gorgeous prose, The Big Girls is her best novel yet.
Set in an upstate New York prison, the story is told in four voices: Helen, serving a life sentence for murdering her kids; her psychiatrist, Dr. Louise Forrest, a recently divorced mother and a bit of a mess herself; Ike Bradshaw, a corrections officer; and Angie Mills, an ambitious L.A. actor. Their stories shift and collide like tectonic plates, exposing their yearnings and regrets, and the primal fury that exists within families.
The novel is also a devastating portrayal of prison life. After finishing her first draft, Moore spent an edifying year teaching at a Brooklyn correctional facility: “They have this elaborate, complex, subtle, delicate, passionate world of all women, in which family relationships are mimicked,” she says. Moore marvelously captures those intricate social hierarchies, and fearlessly examines the criminal-justice system. She also takes a hard look at how society deals (or doesn’t) with mental health issues.
But above all, Moore wanted to write about being a mother, an experience inherently marked by ambivalence and volatility. “When my daughter realized that the story was about a woman who kills her children, she was really interested, in a charming way,” Moore says, laughing. “Not angry, just very interested.”—Carmela Ciuraru
The prison setting makes this an intense read, but Moore’s skill at making troubled characters appealing pulls her novel out of the depths.
