Susanna Moore grew up in Honolulu in the 1950s and '60s. While she has authored six successful novels, Moore drew inspiration from her childhood in Hawaii to craft I Myself Have Seen It. In this memoir, she weaves her own memories of growing up in Honolulu with a concise chronicle of Hawaii's two-hundred-year encounter with the West—from the great explorer Captain Cook to the American missionaries who followed in his wake to the nineteenth-century haole landowners whose enormous plantations and close-knit society reshaped island life. By turns a sweeping, romantic tale of native kings and ancient ritual and a vividly drawn, personal memoir of a world that is now all but gone, I Myself Have Seen It unfolds against a fascinating backdrop of Polynesian myth whose ocean spirits and fire gods still cast powerful spells. This work, like W. S. Merwin's Mays of Ventadorn, is a part of National Geographic's "Directions" series, which is a collection of literary travel books that allow readers to travel the world without leaving the comforts of their favorite reading nooks.
• My Old Sweetheart (1982)
• The Whiteness of Bones (1989)
• Sleeping Beauties (1993)
• In the Cut (1995)
• I Myself Have Seen It: The Myth of Hawai'i (2003)
