Jennifer Haigh's 'Rabbit Moon' Explores Multi-Cultural Family Drama

In her 7th novel, New York Times bestselling author, Jennifer Haigh, presents Rabbit Moon, a fast-paced, poignant drama that opens with a young American woman named Lindsey who moves abroad to teach English in Shanghai. As the story continues, “…[she’s] standing on a sidewalk shortly after dawn on a Sunday morning in the financial district of Shanghai, and a car whips around the corner and slams into her… her family’s found and her divorced parents, who hate each other and also have never traveled to Asia before, do what any parent would do: they both get on separate planes, come to China, and meet up in Shanghai.” For Haigh, who visited Shanghai back in 2016, she experienced a culture there unlike any other she’d ever encountered. “Of any place I have ever traveled, and I’ve traveled quite a bit, I have never felt so thoroughly foreign any other place I’ve gone as I did in Shanghai, and it was overwhelming, but it was also what I found captivating about the experience… what I found most remarkable was the rate of change in this place. It is not a backward-looking city… it is entirely forward-looking and it’s really difficult to even to find traces of old Shanghai… even as I was there in 2016, it occurred to me that if I came back here in five years, I wouldn’t recognize anything, and I’m sure that’s true…”

Unlike Haigh’s other novels, Rabbit Moon is her first book to be set outside of the United States. While in Shanghai, Haigh spent a majority of her time writing the manuscript in public places, such as parks, teahouses, and restaurants. This allowed her to fully immerse in the environment and culture around her. Additionally, she was also able to focus solely on her writing because the languages spoken were so unfamiliar to her. She remarked, “Being out in public spaces, I could at least see people and feel life happening around me even if I couldn’t participate in it or communicate with anybody… So I think that is really what drew me out, and then what I found when I came out of my hole was so fascinating… this book is full of the kind of observation that is almost impossible to do when you’re writing about a familiar place. One of the advantages of travel is you get fresh eyes and for a writer that is a priceless thing. Also, because I could not understand [the] language, all I had was what I could observe and so it’s like losing a sense kind of sharpens your other senses in a way. I don’t know if that’s exactly true, but it felt that way.”