Biting the Moon - (Writing American Women) by Joanne S Frye (Hardcover)

About the Book

Joanne Frye reflects on her experience as a literary scholar and single mother, seeing her life as the convergence of "three strands of contemporary culture; feminism, literature and changing ideas of motherhood."

Book Synopsis

A second-year doctoral student from a Midwestern family, Frye is twenty-three when she marries a German professor ten years her senior. Previously sheltered, Frye seeks new vistas but instead finds herself confined by the demands of her life: wife to a volatile and domineering husband, mother of two young daughters, and aspiring academic. With her dissertation completed, she finally realizes that the only way to wrest her identity and freedom from her husband's grip is by leaving him; she boards a bus with her two young children to embark on a new life.

In Biting the Moon, Frye powerfully recounts her struggle for independence and a successful career while remaining devoted to her daughters. Despite the many promises of the women's movement--liberation from domestic work and the ability to influence social policy--she wrestles with the complex, often ambivalent, relationship between feminism and motherhood. Interwoven with literary references from Charlotte Brontë to Virginia Woolf to Tillie Olsen, Biting the Moon invites the reader along on Frye's quest for self-expression and a life beyond the shadows of others. This deeply felt, courageous portrait of a woman's life will be intimately familiar to an older generation of mothers and an inspiration to a younger generation.

Review Quotes

It is freshly organized and splendidly sustained. . . . It held me and challenged me, caused me to cringe and to laugh and to examine my own life as a father, husband, former teacher, grandfather, writer.-- "William Kloefkorn, author of Breathing in the Fullness of Time"

The power of this book is that it speaks to people in many walks of life, men as well as women, single parents and parents in couples, people across generations. In that sense it is a memoir in the best sense--that it speaks to universal struggles and concerns. Readers will be captivated.-- "Jane Lazarre, author of Inheritance: A Novel"

This memoir makes a real contribution to the ever-growing body of testimonial literature that contemporary feminism has given rise to. I applaud the difficult truth-telling it embodies.-- "Vivian Gornick, author of Fierce Attachments: A Memoir"

About the Author

Joanne Frye is professor emerita of English and women's studies at the College of Wooster in Ohio. She is the author of Living Stories, Telling Lives: Women and the Novel in Contemporary Experience and Tillie Olsen: A Study of the Short Fiction.