The Pull of the Moon_ A Novel - By Elizabeth Berg Page 0,57

women who often feel like murdering their husbands, but God forbid anyone else say anything bad about them. I get letters from daughters who say the book helped them better understand their mothers, and from husbands who say it helped them understand their wives. I get letters from gay men saying that they can relate to the book and that of all my titles, it’s their favorite, and I suspect it’s because The Pull of the Moon is about finding safe harbor inside yourself, learning to like and celebrate the unique individual that you are.

In the years since the book came out, I have learned how much more alike than different we all are, not only women, but men, too. Literally coast to coast, people have told me that reading The Pull of the Moon made them think I’d been looking in their windows, eavesdropping on their conversations. They have thanked me for putting into words the things they’ve felt but couldn’t say.

The Pull of the Moon is the only novel I’ve written that has become a play, and what a profound experience it was for me to sit with an audience in the dark and think that all of us were feeling pretty much the same thing when the eighty-five-year-old character, Eugenie, tells Nan that no matter what she may be feeling, she most likely has “a lot of folks right with [her].” I heard audiences loudly laugh at Nan telling a hairdresser to sit down and she’d cut his hair, and quietly weep when Nan listened to a man talk about the day he and his wife came home from the doctor’s office after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

People often ask me if I ever took the kind of journey Nan does. And I tell them no, I had to write about it in order to have the experience vicariously. Certain readers were braver than I: When I was on tour for the book in Salt Lake City, a woman marched up to me and said, “Well, I got my hair done, I got a journal, and I’m hitting the road.” There’s not a doubt in my mind that she arrived home glad she had made that trip. Because I’m pretty sure the gift you get when you do such a thing is to reclaim or even discover for the first time a certain authenticity of self, which, when we do not have it, makes for a dark and ineluctable despair.

In the end I think the book is best summarized by what a male reviewer said: “This is not a novel about a woman leaving home, but rather a human being finding her way back.” I look forward to the day when I follow my own advice and put the key in the ignition, heading off for the nowhere that leads to everything.

Questions and Topics for Discussion

1. What drives Nan to leave Boston for parts unknown? Have you ever felt a “howling so fierce” that you wanted to run away for a time? Did you act on the impulse? If so, what happened? If not, what kept you from running away?

2. This novel is called The Pull of the Moon. What do you think it means? What does the moon represent in mythology and folklore, and how do the cycles of the moon relate to women and their bodies?

3. Elizabeth Berg tells this story entirely through journal entries and letters. Did you enjoy this method of storytelling? What is the difference between what Nan writes to Martin and what she confides to her journal?

4. As Nan begins her journey she decides 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?”. What does she gain when she carries out this plan? Is it hard to establish an intimacy with strangers? Have you ever done it? If so, what happened?

5. How do you picture Martin reacting to his wife’s letters? Do Nan’s feelings about Martin and the messages she sends to him change over the course of the story?

6. Nan wonders, “What if Martin is keeping a journal too?”. If he did, what would Martin write about? Would he consider his wife’s behavior selfish or self-indulgent? Would you sympathize with him if he felt this way?

7. “I am preoccupied with my body. Overly watchful of change,” says Nan. How are the themes of body image and mortality explored throughout the novel?

8. Do