Great New Book: "Driving By Moonlight"

Friends,
 
    Just finished a book that I'd call a "must-read" for Friends, with special
interest for women: "Driving By Moonlight," by Kristin Henderson, just out from
Seal Press.
 
    WARNING: Do NOT start this book when you have a lot of work to do. It was
very hard to put down, and I stayed up way too late (even for me) over the past
few nights to finish it.
 
    While it can be called a memoir, and is, as she says, "a true story -- both
true and a story," it's also a "road book", built around an 8000-mile trip she
made across the country and back in a Corvette right after 9-11. 
 
    But of course, the journey is also an archetypal Quest, and a Spiritual
Pilgrimage. And interwoven with that are three other major themes, each richly
and achingly detailed:
 
    Her marriage, which is a good one, but with very serious strains --among
them:

    Her consuming lust to have a child, which only intensifies through 8 years
of excruciating struggles with infertility.
 
    Her Quakerism, which encompasses devotion to and questions about it. The
questions swirl around both the peace testimony after the Twin Towers, as well
as the "whole Christian thing." She's "worn orthodoxy as long as she canst,"
but belief in it is slipping away from her, no matter how hard she tries to
hold on, and even as she becomes more firmly settled as a Quaker.
 
    All this circles back to her marriage, because her husband is a devoutly
believing Lutheran minister, who counts on their always having a love of Jesus
Christ as divine savior in common.
 
    And he's not just a minister, but one who has lusted to be a chaplain in
the Marines, and finally achieves his goal. He heads for Afghanistan on a
troopship as she heads west in the Corvette, leaving her to agonize both about
his personal fate and about how his acting on his faith connects with her
efforts to act on hers.
 
    This is soap opera material, but there's not a hint of bathos here:
Henderson can write.
 
    While most Friends will have issues that differ from hers, there will be
parallels and overlaps for most of us too, and I expect many a box of Kleenex
will be get soggy while readers miss appointments and neglect chores to see how
it turns out.
 
    "Driving By Moonlight" really ought to be an Oprah bestseller; but I
suspect it won't make the cut: it's too real and painful in too many places.
That's not a criticism in my book, but a truth of marketing. Famine relief
groups know they can't raise money using pictures of children who are actually
starving; American readers recoil from such realistic images, turn away in
denial.
 
    Henderson is frequently funny, and regularly insightful--aphoristic gems
sparkle from  her quickly-turning pages. Yet she doesn't soften anything,
doesn't turn away, and my hat is off to her for that. 
 
    "Driving By Moonlight" is real Quaker truth-speaking, something all-too
rare among Friends (as everywhere else), and would deserve to be cherished for
that witness alone. Fortunately there is more here to make it memorable
reading. Much more.
 
    Don't miss it.
 
Chuck Fager
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