The Lover by Marguerite Duras: A Preview and Reading Schedule

Join us starting June 11 to read The Lover by Marguerite Duras with Honor Moore

We're delighted to have Honor Moore joining us to host an APS Together reading of The Lover by Marguerite Duras. We start Wednesday, June 11 and finish June 18. Honor's daily notes will be posted here every morning. A preview, and the reading schedule, are below.

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A Note from Honor Moore

When I first read The Lover in 1984, it was already an international literary sensation, a rare event at a time when a woman’s intimate voice was still unusual in fiction, and the genre we now call memoir was in its infancy. For me, Marguerite Duras’s associative prose—her sardonic voice, her gorgeous descriptions of the landscape of Vietnam, the country where my generation of young men fought a war, and her deft integration of the cruelties of racism, colonialism, and family sexual violence—was a revelation. As I have read and reread it over four decades, The Lover has remained a North Star in my writing life, mysteriously shape-shifting as the concerns of my work and life have evolved. Pieces of narrative that I missed became evident, seemingly arbitrary juxtapositions revealed their meanings, characters their poignancy, and the person within the author’s indelibly rendered selves came forward again and again. In this moment of change, chaos, uncertainty, and violence, it seems time to revisit this late twentieth-century classic.

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Reading Schedule

Day 1: (June 11) 1-17 (ends at “tennis at the Sporting Club.”)
Day 2: (June 12) 18-33 (ends at “in the direction of Saigon.”)
Day 3: (June 13) 34-50 (ends at “here by correspondence.”)
Day 4: (June14) 51-69 (ends at “was ‘at home’ certain days like her.”)
Day 5: (June15) 69-86 (ends at “My mother turned her head.”)
Day 6: (June 16) 86-102 (ends at “he wakes her with kisses.”)
Day 7: (June 17) 102-117

A Conversation with Honor Moore
Join us on June 18 at 7:00 pm (ET) for a finale conversation with Honor Moore and A Public Space editor Brigid Hughes. Register here.

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Honor Moore is a poet and memoirist. Her memoir A Termination (A Public Space Books), an account of her pre-Roe abortion and how that act of resistance shaped and allowed who she became, was a New York Times Editors' Choice. She is also the author of the memoirs Our Revolution, a Mother and Daughter at Midcentury and The Bishop’s Daughter (both Norton). For the Library of America, she edited Poems from the Women's Movement and Women's Liberation: Feminist Writings that Inspired a Revolution and Still Can! She lives in New York City, where she teaches in the MFA program at the New School.

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