Nan turns 50 and hits the road, leaving behind her husband of 25 years and a daughter bound for college. At midlife, she is deeply unsatisfied with the way things are going. Alternating between diary entries and letters sent to her husband, Nan reveals her fear of aging and her encounters with people on the road, including hilarious conversations with a snobby hairdresser and a chatty waiter obsessed with angels. She takes the time to conquer small fears (sleeping outdoors) and to revel in small pleasures (shelling peas while rocking on a porch). She makes some concrete decisions on how she will change her life (build a smaller, more comfortable house, spend time cooking with her husband), and she doesn't end her trip until she's absolutely ready. Berg, also the author of Talk before Sleep (1994) and Range of Motion (1995), nimbly avoids all the obvious cliches of an all-too-familiar theme as she drives her narrative home with direct, heartfelt language. She has a real gift for imbuing ordinary lives with emotional weight and heft. Joanne Wilkinson
From Kirkus Reviews
Berg's fourth novel in four years (Range of Motion, 1995, etc.) alternates mawkish diary entries with chilly letters home by a woman who's run away to ``find herself'' after 30 or so years of marriage, in a tale that seems better suited to the 1970s than the 1990s. Fifty-year-old Nan, who's never worked, writes daily bulletins to excoriated husband Martin from the road, letting him know obliquely why she left by sharing secrets, including the fact that she feels continually diminished by his habitual lack of attention to what she says; that she's been going through a rough menopause, ``acutely missing my periods,'' and feeling like ``some old gal;'' that she fears the dark and hates that about herself; and that she wishes she and Martin could go live in a much smaller house by the ocean, with ``golden-colored wooden stairs and a small fieldstone fireplace,'' urging Martin to call an architect and have plans drawn up for such a house when she returns home. Talk about mixed messages. In her italicized diary entries, she remembers her past (pre-Martin boyfriends from the 1960s, the ways in which she tried to raise her now-grown daughter, Ruthie, ``to be different from me'') and chronicles her encounters with other loners (a teen-aged boy in an Ohio mall who wants to sleep with her; a humiliated wife in an Iowa garden-supply store; a bereaved young husband in a Minnesota motor park). She faces her fears (sleeps outside in the moonless dark, confronts her sexuality alone in a motel room one night) and gradually begins to miss Martin. So, finally, she heads back home to Boston, scripting her reunion with Martin in letters that contain not a shadow of a doubt that he wants her back. The culture doesn't want her back--she's idle, self-absorbed, and dull in ways we haven't encountered for 20 years. An uninspiring concoction. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
“Breathtaking . . . [Berg] writes with wry wit and aching lyricism, painting her characters as vividly as anyone writing today.”—Charlotte Observer
“Reading The Pull of the Moon is like sitting down for a long, satisfying chat with a best girlfriend. . . . [It] pleasantly encourages readers to recover a little life-embracing enthusiasm themselves."—Orlando Sentinel
“When was the last time you thought about running away? . . . In The Pull of the Moon, Berg shares her strength, the wonderful widening of her soul so that we, too, can take the journey in the ease of our chair.”—Greensboro News & Record
“Berg’s gift as a storyteller lies most powerfully in her ability to find the extraordinary in the ordinary, the remarkable in the everyday.”—The Boston Globe
From the Trade Paperback edition.
From the Inside Flap
e with the fit of her life, now that she's in the middle of it, Nan gets into her car and just goes--driving across the country on back roads, following the moon; and stopping to talk to people. Through conversations with women, men, with her husband through letters, and with herself through her diary, Nan confronts topics long overdue for her attention. She writes to her husband and says things she's never admitted before; and she discovers how the fabric of her life can be reshaped into a more authentic creation.
About the Author
Elizabeth Berg first attempted to be published at age nine, when she submitted a poem called 'Dawn' to American Girl magazine. As she was rejected, she got into a snit and abandoned submitting (though not writing) for 25 years.
She was a registered nurse, a lead singer in a rock band, a waitress, an information clerk at a hotel, an actress in an improvisational theater group, and a secretary. Not all at once, of course. In 1985, she entered an essay contest at Parents Magazine and won. For seven years thereafter, she wrote personal essays and short stories for many magazines, including Redbook, The New York Times Magazine and New Woman. During that time, she was nominated for a National Magazine Award. She also wrote and delivered essays on Special Reports Television, and on 'Chronicle', a television news magazine in Boston.
In 1992, she published her first book, Family Traditions. Since then, she has written five novels: Durable Goods, Talk Before Sleep, (a finalist for the 1996 ABBY Award), Range of Motion, The Pull of the Moon (to be published in paperback next fall by Jove), and Joy School. She is at work on another novel, still writes an occasional essay, and still thinks fondly of all the jobs she had except for the time she had to wash chickens in a hospital cafeteria. She has two daughters who write at least as well as she does. Berg lives in Massachusetts, and would never want to live anywhere else, not even in California.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Dear Martin,
I know you think I keep that green rock by my bed because I like its color. And I do like its color. But the reason I keep it by my bed is that oftentimes I wake up frightened, and it comforts me to hold it then. I squeeze it. I lie on my side away from you and I squeeze the rock and look out the window and think that outside are rocks just like this one, lying still and strong and silent. They are beside rivers in Egypt and in fields in Germany and at the center of the desert and on the moon. The rock seems to act as a conduit, drawing out of me whatever it is that is making my heart race, whatever is making me feel as though my own soul is one step ahead of me, saying don’t come. Don’t bother. Martin, I am fifty years old. The time of losses is upon me. Maybe that’s it. I don’t know. I saw Kotex in the drugstore the other day and began to weep. Then I saw a mother with a very little girl, helping her pick out crayons, and this, too, undid me. I had to leave without buying what I came for. I drove home and I thought about Ruthie standing next to me as I lay on the couch one day. She was two and a half, holding Legos in the basket of her hands. I had a mild case of flu; I was mostly just exhausted. And Ruthie dropped the Legos on me and used my chest to build a small city and I was perfectly happy. I think I even knew it. It was that Chinese thing, that when your mind is in your heart, you are happy.
You know, Martin, when Ruthie was a freshman in high school, I was driving home from the grocery store one day and listening to the radio and I all of a sudden realized that in four years she would be gone. And I felt like screaming. Not because I have nothing else in my life. Just because she would be gone. I pulled over and I wept so hard the car was shaking, and then I repaired my makeup in the rearview mirror, and then I came home and made dinner and I never said a thing about it, although maybe I should have. Maybe I should have started telling you then. I was afraid, I think, that you would say, “Well, she’ll visit,” and the feeling would have been of all my eggs being walked on by boots.
I’m sorry the note I left you was so abrupt. I just wanted you to know I was safe. But I shouldn’t have said I’d be back in a day or two. I won’t be back for awhile. I’m on a trip. I needed all of a sudden to go, without saying where, because I don’t know where. I know this is not like me. I know that. But please believe me, I am safe and I am not crazy, I felt as though if I didn’t do this I wouldn’t be safe and I would be crazy.
I have no idea what will happen next. I am in a small Holiday Inn one hundred and eighty miles from home. I have a view of the pool. Beside me I have a turquoise journal, tooled leather, held closed by a thin black strap wrapped around a silver button. I bought it the day before I left. Normally, that kind of thing would not appeal to me. But it seemed I had to have it. I opened it, looked at the unlined pages, closed it back up and bought it. It was far too expensive, forty dollars, but it seemed to me to be capable of giving me something I’d pay more for. I thought, I’m going to buy this journal and then I’m going to run away. And that’s what I did.
I don’t mean this to be against you. I don’t mean any of it to be against you. Or even about you. I have felt for so long like I am drowning. And we are so fixed in our ways I couldn’t begin to tell you all that has happened inside me. It was like this: I would be standing over you pouring your coffee and looking down at your thinning hair and I would be loving you, Martin, but I would feel as though I were on a ship pulling away from the shore. As though the fact of your sitting there in your usual spot with cornflakes and orange juice was the most fantastic science fiction. I would put the coffeepot back on the warmer and sit opposite you and talk about what was in the newspaper, and inside me would be a howling so fierce I couldn’t believe the sounds weren’t coming out of my eyes, out of my ears, from beneath my fingernails. I couldn’t believe we weren’t both astonished—made breathless—at this sudden excess in me, this unmanageable mess. There were a couple of times I tried to start telling you about it. But I couldn’t do it. There were no words. As even now, there are not. Not really.
I’ll call Ruthie. I’ll tell her. You can tell everyone else anything you want. I mean this kindly, Martin.
I’ll write you often. I don’t want to talk. Please Well. You know, I write that word please and I don’t have any idea what to say after it. But please. And can you believe this? I love you.
Nan
I think the last time I had a diary I was eleven years old. At the top of every page, I would say what we had for dinner. That was the most interesting part. I thought filthy was thilthy. “Todd Lundgren is thilthy!” I wrote. Because I saw him at a party putting his hands up Maria Gonzales’s skirt. She was wearing nylons and her garters were sticking out because her skirt was pushed up so high.
Well, this is probably not what I should say.
But why not.
I know a woman who tapes pictures in her diary, presses flowers in it, she has the clipping from when John Lennon was shot. Well, she says, it’s mine, for me, for whatever I want.
I bought this black pen for you. I feel shy saying this, as though we are friends too new to exchange anything without it being too important.
I have a picture to give you, too. Here is a forties photograph of a woman that I found in last Sunday’s paper. She is seated on the grass, wearing a suit and a hat, her purse centered in her lap. She is smiling, but her eyes ache, and behind her, I know this, her hands are clenched. She can’t relax. She has forgotten the grass. I kept staring at her, thinking, this is me. Checking my purse three times for keys before I leave the house. Stacking mail in order of the size of the envelopes. Answering the phone every single time it rings, writing “paper towels” on the grocery list the second after I use the last one. I too have forgotten the grass. But I used to do one-handed cartwheels and then collapse into it for the fine sight of the blades close up. And there was no sense of any kind of time. And I was not holding in my stomach or thinking what does my opinion mean to others. I was not regretting any part of myself. There was only sun-rich color, and smell, and the slight give of the soft earth beneath me. My mind was in my heart, anchored like a bright kite in a safe place.
I think I will not use a map. And I think I would like to stop at a house now and then and ask any woman I find there, how are you doing? No, but really. How are you doing?
