(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)
If you have ever met someone possessed of singular, unwavering ambition, you will be well acquainted with how consuming that kind of focus can be.
Nothing else matters to that person beyond seeing their vision realised, their life goals realised and all of the hope and possibility of which they have usually dreamed since childhood finding real, tangible form.
It’s an approach that often pays dividends, and impressive ones at that, but as Eliana Ramage’s gloriously intense and heartfelt novel To the Moon and Back demonstrates with poignant thoughtfulness and raw, aching humanity, it can also cost a great deal.
The question, is the huge price paid in terms of all the things that aren’t pursued such as closeness to family, intimacy with heritage and vivacity of romantic relationships worth the realisation of a long-held dream.
The central figure in the book, Steph, would say, initially at least, and in fact, a great deal into the story, that there is no question that all her sacrifices, all her singular focus to become an astronaut has been absolutely worth everything else she has foregone.
Her dream has been realised against a background of a mother fleeing an abusive marriage in the most extraordinary of circumstances, a younger sister who can’t recall the frightening hellishness of a family defined by abuse and a fleeting closeness to her Cherokee heritage which is held up by her mother as a vitally important defining characteristic of who they are.
People talk about wanting to be anywhere but here, but that wasn’t it for me, not ever, not at all. It was wanting, needing, to be somewhere specific. Like I was all my life at a bus stop, reading the schedule again and again, checking my watch. I knew where I was supposed to be.
While Steph does have a closeness to her sister, especially in their younger years, her relationship with her mother is fraught; she loves her, no doubt, but she remembers what she and her mother fled, and how terrifying it was, and she finds it hard to lose herself in the domestic and racial fantasy that her mother concocts to build a place where she can finally belong.
It’s not that Steph doesn’t value her Cherokee heritage, but her sights are set far beyond the lands on which the Cherokee live in Oklahoma, dreaming and hoping and working with ceasing to get into space.
It’s been her dream since she was a child, one weirdly hijacked in part by her now-absent abusive father; it’s such a powerful impelling element that even when her father co-opts in hugely frightening ways, it survives and grows and sustains Steph through her coming of age years when she realises that she not only wants to be an astronaut but that she likes girls and won’t fit the cultural cookie cutter world her mother has fashioned in a whole host of ways.
The dream to go into space influences what she studies, where she studies and why, and it is such an all-consuming thing, that when her mother intervenes in her plans, and things don’t go to plan in a fairly deleterious way, it causes a schism that it takes the fraught mother and daughter relationship many years from which to recover.
At its expansively sprawling heart, To the Moon and Back is a book that goes deep into one woman’s quest to become everything she wants to be and how that affects those women in her orbit (word use deliberately intended) who suffer as the result of her singleminded pursuit of her goal.
What’s interesting here is that Steph begins to understand, often in ways she simply won’t acknowledge in any kind of meaningful way, that she is losing precious parts of herself to her dream.
Rather beautifully, Ramage doesn’t once diminish the importance of Steph’s goals or their importance to her as a woman grappling with considerable issues of racial identity and past trauma and pain, both personally and collectively, but rather To the Moon and Back explores what it is like to be so wholeheartedly committed to something that everything pales into apparent significant.
“Apparent” is the key word there, because Steph knows that every time she sacrifices a particular love interest or puts her family aside to a second or third tier of priorities, that she is eating away at a part of who she is; she wants to fall in love, wants to be close to Kayla and her mother, and wants something meaningful to happen with her uni girlfriend, Della, who is forever defined it seems by being removed from her family under a challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act.
But she WANTS to be an astronaut and that’s all that matters and all she is prepared to put real time and energy into, even if it costs so much else besides.
Nadia touched my wrist. When she turned her hand over, I saw the flash of color leftover from the candies on her palm, bright reds and blues and greens. And I knew.
“Better” meant kinder.
To the Moon and Back is full with characters who capture your heart and your soul, who are presented in fully three-dimensional richness and affecting humanness and whose priorities are not diminished simply because they conflict with those around them.
The novel acknowledges that we are made up of a multitude of thoughts and actions and that while connection matters, and it does, in the end, define us, that it can lose out to the dreams that power us to an imagined bright and glorious future.
Taking place over decades, in which the rise and fall of family, of place and home, of love and estrangement are in a constant state of flux, even if the bedrock which sustains them endures, To the Moon and Back is a densely told story that still manages to feel brilliantly and movingly relatable.
There is a warmth and richness to it that persists even when schisms between characters grow, even when decisions made in pursuit of an idea of vision cost them close to everything and even when you have pause to wonder if it’s all going to be worth it in the end.
Steph wonders that many times, and while she eventually finds her own accommodation with it the push-and-pull between her dream of being an astronaut and giving in to her need for love, romance and connection, To the Moon and Back is always about the balance between future hope and present realities and whether the two can ever really be in balance and if one will always consume the other no matter how well Steph (and often fails but the she’s only human) tries to keep the tension between them taut.