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Bitting the Moon

MEMOIRIST
In 2012, after fifteen years of wrestling with the material, seeking a publisher, waiting for books to arrive, I could finally say that I am a memoirist. Biting the Moon: A Memoir of Feminism and Motherhood portrays my life first in a fraught marriage and then as a single mother of two daughters. It also portrays my writing struggles and my constant need to make sense of life as a woman and a mother.

WRITER
I have long been a writer. Sometimes I wrote in private journals, sometimes I wrote articles for publication, and twice before I wrote books. Each writing experience has been different. But the difficulty recurs: to find the words and structure for the thoughts that rage in my head.

READER
Before I was a writer, I was a reader. I have always read voraciously, with a hunger to understand other people’s lives and to see the world beyond my own limited vision. Often, I read books by women, seeking to understand how other women have made sense of life. Books are my foundation.

REAL LIFE
Outside of books, I am also a parent, a professor, a sister, a daughter, a wife, a social being. And I am a feminist, yearning for the world around me to be different, to be more just, more caring about people with less power, fewer resources.

WITH MY READERS
I would love to carry on a conversation with readers: about how stories work, about women and men and children and families,about what we need to do to make the world we live in more just. I hope that Biting the Moon will prompt readers to think about their own lives, about the lives of others, and about the need to re-vision the world we live in. I plan to keep my own part of the conversation going by periodically posting recent writing on the Reflections page.