When Edith Wharton published The Glimpses of the Moon in 1922, she couldn’t have had any idea how well it would translate to the influencer era a century later. That said, she also didn’t know what influencers are.
Writer and actor Tavi Gevinson and her partner Sam Freilich adapted Wharton’s novel for the modern age in a new audio series from Audible. Glimpses of the Moon follows a social-climbing influencer, Susy (Gevinson), and a down-on-his-luck writer, Nick (Adam DiMarco), who scheme up a wedding for money and clout. Gevinson tapped Succession’s J. Smith Cameron to narrate, and rounded out the cast with Chloe Fineman, Cristin Milioti, Gina Gershon, and The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino and Naomi Fry. Gevinson was keen to integrate the added complications of social media into Wharton’s themes of class and marriage. “It is about class and the performance built into a marriage or a romantic relationship, and it made us think a lot about the performance built into social media,” she says.
The idea struck Freilich around five years ago when he first read Wharton’s novel. “[He] thought it felt so modern,” Gevinson says. “We obviously took a lot of liberties, but Edith Wharton is so great at somehow reading these characters and loving them at the same time.” The duo was also interested in diving into Wharton beyond The Age of Innocence and House of Mirth. While Gevinson declares The Glimpses of the Moon an overlooked text, she notes that it has a rich history of adaptation. “It was made into a silent film, and F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the captions for it, and then he wrote The Great Gatsby two years later. I think there’s a world and spirit that Wharton captured that possibly was an influence there,” she says. And Gevinson and Freilich aren’t the only ones interested in the public domain title. Just last month Francis Ford Coppola told The Telegraph that he is adapting the book “with strong dance and musical elements.”
Gevinson, who—like many 28-year-olds—spends “every goddamn weekend of my life” at weddings, took particular interest in the kinds of facades that marriage begets. “In adult life—even if you don’t publicize your relationship the way that the characters in the show do—you do have some kind of public performance of a romantic relationship,” she says.
Lately, Gevinson has used her work to explore the idea of performing relationships online. Earlier this year, she released Fan Fiction, a 76-page satirical novella about her friendship with Taylor Swift. Her fascination with the dissonance between the self and online presentation comes from having a very public career from a young age. “I’m interested in the slipperiness of combining a self and your embodied experience of daily life with a persona, with your art, with your work, with your relationships,” she says. “If I were to psychoanalyze myself, this interest comes out of seeking some kind of authenticity. I’ve been making art, knowing that it will supposedly reflect on me as a person in some way.”
While Gevinson is far from her character, Susy, she does bring her own experiences to the project. “We were thinking about a show like The Other Two, satirizing all these corners of fashion and media that I know very well,” she says. “There are exchanges in the show that pretty much come from specific parties or dinners, but highly exaggerated with love.” That’s not to say she didn’t look within, though. “To this day I feel painfully humbled over and over by how much working in certain creative fields can rely on keeping up appearances and making things look like they’re going well,” she says. Anyone with an Instagram account can surely relate.
