but sleep, bathrooms, and meals. When I left, I couldn’t wait to get away. Now I can’t wait to get back.
So here I come, Martin, changed a bit, it’s true. I am Nana Exsanna Popana, woman and child. I am every age I ever was and I always will be and I know that now. I am coming home and I want nothing more than to try to tell you everything. I’m so eager to see you, Martin. Perhaps we’ll see each other.
Love,
Nan
The Pull of the Moon
ELIZABETH BERG
A Reader’s Guide
On Writing The Pull of the Moon
In the early nineties, I was in one of my favorite bookstores in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when I saw a journal that I liked very much. Its cover was tooled leather in a rich turquoise color, and it had a big silver button you wrapped a length of black rawhide around to keep it closed. I wanted to buy it, but when I saw the price—forty dollars!—I decided not to.
Still, on the way home I kept thinking about it: how satisfying the rough texture of the cover felt beneath my fingers, how smooth the pages were, and how they sang a siren song, asking to be filled with lines of black ink from a fountain pen. But the price was just ridiculous. Besides that, what happens with me and really nice journals is that they intimidate me. I find them too pretty to use; I don’t want to make mistakes in them. I thought, Who would buy such a journal and really use it? And into my head, fully formed, walked Nan, the protagonist of The Pull of the Moon. I saw her as fifty years old, mildly overweight, attractively disheveled, and full of despair about things she just couldn’t articulate. I saw her as having a good heart but a confused one. I saw her walking into that same bookstore, seeing the journal, and understanding that she needed to buy it and then run away from home. Not for forever, just long enough for her to understand what was going on inside her.
Nan is married to Martin, and as the novel begins she leaves him a note on the kitchen table, explaining that she has to go without really knowing where. She tells him that she will keep in touch with him, that she will return (though she doesn’t know when), and that she loves him.
Next comes a journal entry, and this establishes the format of the novel: letters alternating with entries in a journal. Originally, I’d thought that the content would deal with the kind of psychic avalanche that menopause brings. I thought it would talk about what it means to a woman to lose her fertility and to suffer the ancillary changes that come with that, from emotional lability to the humiliation of whiskers suddenly appearing on one’s chin. But the novel became much more than that. It became a kind of polemic against the way women continue to be underestimated and mistreated, and how aging women in this culture are not valued and often seem all but invisible. It demonstrated the worth of the spontaneous conversation, and the joy of traveling slowly down lesser-used roads, taking the time to explore everything that appeals to you, whether that’s a yellow dress in a storefront window, or fresh-picked peaches at a farm stand, or a conversation with a World War II vet who uses his local library for socializing—and for feeling that he still has something to give. Nan gently counsels a young man suffering from his parents’ recent divorce, and learns about the dangers of stereotyping from a salty woman wearing cha-cha shoes who’s hanging out laundry in the trailer park where she lives. On more than one occasion, Nan sleeps alone out in the woods, trying to overcome a fear of the dark she’s had since childhood.
Nan tries to understand the place she and her husband have come to in their marriage, and why. She learns that in the end, one must rely upon oneself more than anyone else, and that doing so can bring a grounded happiness and strength—and relief.
What has surprised me about the reception to the book is how many younger women resonated with and related to it. I continue to get letters from twenty- or thirtysomething women who thank me for recognizing that sweet satisfaction and abject boredom can coexist in the heart of a stay-at-home mom. Other letters contain metaphorical pokes in the ribs from older, long-married