The Pull of the Moon

Sometimes you have to leave your life behind for a while to see it and really live it freshly again. In this luminous and exquisitely written new novel by Elizabeth Berg, a woman follows the pull of the moon to find her way home. Now, in the middle of her life and with her soul fraying, Nan begins an impromptu trek across the country, inspired by a turquoise leather journal she sees in a bookstore and knows she must buy - and fill. As she writes in it, and talks with people she meets, she also sends letters home to her husband: "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...I would be standing over you pouring your coffee...and inside me would be howling so fierce I couldn't believe the sounds weren't coming out of my eyes, out of my ears, from beneath my fingernails." What makes for this kind of a change in a person? How do we lose our strength, our clarity of vision, our sureness of purpose? And, more important, how do we regain it? Sometimes humorous, sometimes heartbreaking, always intimate and honest, The Pull of the Moon is a novel about a woman coming to terms with issues of importance to all women. Nan addresses the thorniness - and the allure - of marriage; the sweet ties to children; the gifts and lessons that come from random encounters with strangers, be they a handsome man appearing out of the woods or a lonely housewife sitting on her front porch steps. Most of all, Nan writes about the need for the self to stay alive.