The Pull of the Moon – Elizabeth Berg

Nan is fifty, the mother of a grown daughter who has a life of her own, and the wife of Martin. After a lifetime of being available for other people, Nan has run away from home – she drives wherever the road takes her, talking to strangers she meets along the way, stopping when and where she feels like, writing as she goes. Between letters to her husband and diary entries for herself, Nan reflects on her life, her sense of self, and works out what she wants from here.
I liked that some of Nan’s meetings are with characters from other Berg novels, offering us the slightest glimpses of aspects unseen in the novels where they star. I don’t know, having not yet read the entire Berg oeuvre, I all the characters have (or will have) their own books, but it added another layer and the presence of those I recognised was natural and unforced.
Berg’s gift is her ability to articulate the experience of being human, and particularly of being a woman – Nan is honest and unguarded, both in her behaviour and in her writing, and in the process is open to life. She decides to talk more to other women, and discovers truths she never suspected – like the universal experiences of motherhood:

when our children are small and we are so weary with the demands for love and attention and the kind of service that makes you feel you should be wearing a uniform with ‘Mommy’ embroidered over the left breast; over the heart… it wasn’t that I was really unhappy. It was the constancy of my load and the awesome importance of it; and it was my isolation…

I really can’t do justice to Berg’s work, at least not without quoting half the book. In no particular order, Nan reflects on the erosion by adulthood of life as a child, “like a wild, beating thing, exotic, capable of unfolding and enlarging itself; pulling itself higher and higher like a kite loved by the wind,” on the differences between men and women, in all aspects, and the nature of her marriage, and that menopause, the change that sparked Nan’s journey, can be the beginning of something new and not just an end.
This is explicit – in one of her meetings, Nan speaks with a man who reflects on his own mother: “

She launched herself into a new life where she felt she could say the hell with anything she didn’t like, and by god, she did say the hell with anything she didn’t like… She was really different, and at first this scared me, but then I realized I liked her better. She became a real person to me. She was interesting… And she was happy, I swear, until the day she died. We knew exactly who we were burying.

Above all, and a unifying theme, is the marginalizing of women –

the working hearts and minds of women are just so interesting, so full of color and life. And one of the most tragic things I’ve seen is the way that’s been overlooked, the way that if you try to discover what the women were doing at any given time in history, you are hard-pressed to find out. Why? I want to say to you that we are not silly, that what we think about, and what drives us to talk, talk, talk, this is vital.

As Nan points out, much of it we do ourselves – drop plans we crafted when a man says

’My God… you’re serious?’ And when he said that, I saw all that I had said in a different light, and I was so ashamed. I said, Well, no, not really.I don’t know why I did that. I hate that I did that.

Lynn is not the kind of woman whose opinions and plans are shaped by other people in this way (I can hear her now – “Yes, I am serious. Got a problem with it? I don’t care, it’s not your life – make your own plans”) but I am and, like Nan, I don’ even notice that’s what I’m doing. But, though not a universal story, I think this is a novel that will resonate with many women, and give some men an insight into the nature of being female. Go on now, read it - Alex