June 23, 2026
Ahh, sometimes you just read a book at exactly the right time!
I read this story of a middle-aged woman who walks away from her life for a time, in an effort to find herself, while I was very pregnant with my second baby. Motherhood had become a rather fraught thing for me, having lost my first child in a stillbirth only 2 years earlier. Reading The Pull of the Moon unmade me and stitched me back together. It broke my heart at points, and filled me with warmth. It made me think of my own mom in a new light.
I was actually surprised at how much I related to this story given that the main character and I were in such different life stages - me, eagerly and anxiously anticipating this new season of motherhood; her on the other side of it, with a grown daughter out of the house and menopause on the horizon. But I think we can all probably relate to that search for self. It's so easy to lose ourselves in all the minutia of the day-to-day, how do we find our way back?
This is one book I'll surely read at several points in my life, a book that has found a home on the bookshelf in my soul.
