Biting the Moon: A Memoir of Feminism and Motherhood (Syracuse University Press, 2012)
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. Drawn by the promises of the women’s movement—the ability to influence social policy and liberation from domestic work—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. (from the book jacket)
Comments from the book cover:
“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
“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 story is here and it is dramatic, compelling and important. I won’t forget it.” --Elaine Neil Orr, author of Gods of Noonday: A White Girl’s African Life
“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