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Liz Moore on The God of the Woods
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A family place, a childhood fear, and a story that wouldn’t closeThe novel’s geography is not invented. Moore’s ancestors settled the southern Adirondacks in the early 1800s, and the land shaped her family for generations before it shaped this book. The cabin her grandparents built still stands, and she brings her own children there now, which means the setting carries a particular kind of authority: not research, but inheritance.
Four of my ancestors moved there in the early 1800s, lured from other parts of the northeastern United States by talk of plentiful arable land. But they soon discovered that the rocky mountain terrain there actually makes it difficult to sustain a farm, and they settled just south of the Adirondacks, where my grandmother and mother were born and raised. My grandparents did build a summer home there (much different in scale than the ‘great camp’ in the book — ours is more like a small wooden cabin). The cabin still stands; I grew up going each summer, and I bring my own children there to this day.
The class history buried inside the Adirondack Park’s founding gave Moore the novel’s ideological engine. She traced the moment when New York State’s interest in conservation was effectively switched on by wealth, and found a tension that ran straight through to the Van Laars and their neighbors.
Only when very wealthy families like the Roosevelts, the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers began to discover the beauty of the Adirondacks and began to make summer homes in the Adirondacks did the government of New York state suddenly become interested in environmental conservation, which, of course, was a morally complex issue because it put pressure on the many working-class people who had made their living off the land.
The immediate spark was a short story published in Tin House around 2012 or 2013, called ‘Shy Shy,’ set at a summer camp much like Camp Emerson. Moore recognized that the world she had built in that story was vivid enough to return to, but that the story itself lacked the tension a novel demands. She held onto the place and began asking what else could populate it. What she brought with her from childhood was not affection for camp but something more ambivalent.
I did go to summer camp. It was in the Adirondacks. I went for two years right around the same age as the girls in the book were... I in theory should have loved going to camp, but in practice I hated it. And then I wrote The God of the Woods. [paraphrased from audio]
That gap between what she was supposed to feel and what she actually felt turned out to be useful material. A writer who loved camp might have written a nostalgia novel. Moore wrote a thriller.
How she wrote it
No outline, a scrapped novel, and a panopticon of secretsMoore did not arrive at Camp Emerson directly. She spent time working on an entirely different novel set in the Adirondacks, one that ultimately refused to cohere, and only by abandoning it did she find the story underneath.
It’s a fun exercise for me to never outline a novel. That’s my practice because it lets me discover things at the same time that the reader does.
The decision not to outline has a cost: it occasionally produces full drafts that have to be abandoned. The novel Moore published began only after she discarded its predecessor entirely and kept nothing but the landscape. She described reaching the book’s actual premise only after that loss.
I thought this would be a one disappearance book when I first started it – I thought only Barbara would disappear – but as I started to do more sketch work around her and her family and to discover the reason why her family is so cold to her besides just being sort of assholes, it occurred to me that maybe there was a separate tragedy in their past that turned them, at least partially, into the way they are today. Suddenly I had two disappearances on my hands to solve and multiple secrets for different characters to keep.
Bear’s mystery, the second disappearance, was not planned. It arrived through a character Moore had initially resisted writing: Alice Van Laar, Bear’s mother, whom Moore found difficult to like. The act of writing Alice’s relationship with her son forced a realization about what Bear’s death would have meant to her, and that realization determined the novel’s central tragedy.
I began to understand what happened to Bear as I began to understand Bear’s mother’s backstory and her trajectory as a character... I began to understand that the worst possible thing that could have happened to her was not only to lose her son, but to be directly or indirectly the cause of his death. And suddenly I realized that’s what happened to Bear. [paraphrased from audio]
With multiple characters carrying secrets the reader cannot learn too early, the novel’s many-voiced structure was not a stylistic preference but a technical necessity. Moore developed a spatial metaphor for how it functions.
I think of TGOTW as a kind of panopticon where everybody is looking out at each other and can only see certain angles. There was the technical thing where certain characters couldn’t tell certain parts of the story without removing all suspense because certain characters harbor a secret that the reader cannot know too early. So whenever I got to a part in a character’s POV where suddenly if they continued telling the story they’d tell too much, I’d just jump into another character’s POV and let them tell the story with information missing because they didn’t know it.
The personal thread
The names she chose were an argumentThe Van Laar estate is named Self-Reliance, and the camp below it is named Camp Emerson, after Ralph Waldo Emerson. Moore chose both names knowing exactly what she was doing. The Van Laars do not represent Emersonian ideals in action; they represent the myth those ideals can become when wealth insulates a family from the interdependence it depends on.
They’re this hyper wealthy family living a rarefied existence, having convinced themselves that they’ve done it all themselves, that they are self-reliant, that they didn’t need anybody else, when in fact they built the house compound on the back of the local people in the nearby community. But they don’t recognize that.
The argument those names encode is one Moore holds as a matter of genuine conviction, not just narrative strategy. She has stated it plainly in her own terms, and the survival advice threaded through the novel, when lost, sit down and yell, is its practical expression.
I fundamentally disagree with Ralph Waldo Emerson, when he says that the pinnacle of character is self-reliance, because I believe in a society that relies upon others. I’m of the mindset that sometimes you do have to just sit down and yell when you’re lost.
That instruction, sit down and yell, runs against every instinct a person has when frightened in the woods. Moore’s point is that the instinct to push forward alone, to solve the problem through will rather than through asking for help, is precisely what gets people killed.
On what the book is wrestling with
Who gets to be self-reliant, and at whose expenseThe Adirondack Park’s founding history, conservation imposed by wealth, gave Moore the novel’s political spine. But the same dynamic that excluded working-class families from the land also excluded women within those wealthy families from any meaningful agency. Moore built the 1970s setting around the intersection of those two exclusions.
One thing about having characters who represent all societal classes is that you have to look for themes that can apply across multiple axes. And one of them is the way in the 1950s and the 1970s — and still today, unfortunately — in which women within every societal class have sought power and lost power.
The investigator Judy Luptack, a character based on the real first class of women promoted to investigator rank in the New York State Police, the first such class in the country, carries the novel’s most direct engagement with that exclusion. Her disadvantage in a male institution creates an unexpected opening, one her male colleagues cannot access.
By virtue of the fact that she’s a woman, she’s able to access certain information that some of her male colleagues are not able to access. And certain characters in the book trust her in a way that they don’t trust the men.
Grief is the private engine beneath the novel’s public machinery of class and gender. Moore has described it as the force that drives characters toward choices that seem, from the outside, inexplicable or cruel, and that produce consequences none of them predicted.
The theme of grief, I would say, is a strong motivating factor: people seeking to heal their grief or to heal themselves in ways that are both healthy and damaging. When somebody seeks to heal their grief in a way that’s unwise, that can become a domino effect and have outcomes that they didn’t predict, which I do think is the case in this book.
What she wants us to sit with
When lost, sit down and yellThe title arrived through etymology. While researching the word panic, Moore found that it traces back to Pan, the Greek god of the woods, whose presence was said to disorient travelers until they lost all sense of direction. There is a real term, wood panic, for the disorientation that comes from being surrounded by trees that all look identical. At the WAMC Book Show, she described the moment of discovering Pan’s connection to that experience as finding a phrase that gathered all of the novel’s characters and themes into a single image.
[paraphrased from audio] The title came from researching the etymology of ‘panic,’ which traces back to Pan, the Greek god of the woods — and the idea that the beauty and the peril of the wilderness cannot be separated from each other.
The novel asks whether the wilderness can be both refuge and trap simultaneously, not as a paradox to resolve but as a condition to accept. Anne LaBastille, the conservationist who lived for years as a hermit in the remote Adirondacks and published a series of books about that life, provided Moore with an epigraph and with the formulation she carried through the writing: the beauty and the danger are the same thing.
I have a long family history in the Adirondacks. My mother’s ancestors migrated there from other parts of New England in the 1800s, and they lived in the Southern Adirondacks for about three to four generations. I spent a lot of time there growing up. My grandparents built a cabin and we still go there; I bring my own kids to the house.
That family continuity is the novel’s emotional substrate. The Adirondacks that Moore wrote is not a backdrop. It is a place she has returned to across her entire life, and the book is partly an attempt to reckon with what that place has taken from people, across generations, as well as what it has given.