Mother, Nature
A 5,000-Mile Journey to Discover if a Mother and Son Can Survive Their Differences
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the author of To Shake the Sleeping Self . . .
“Exquisitely written and completely compelling . . . As Jedidiah Jenkins traces a 5,000-mile route with his wildly entertaining mother, Barb, he begins to untangle the live wires of a parent-child bond and to wrestle with a love that hurts.”—Suleika Jaouad, author of Between Two Kingdoms
LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST
When his mother, Barbara, turns seventy, Jedidiah Jenkins is reminded of a sobering truth: Our parents won’t live forever. For years, he and Barbara have talked about taking a trip together, just the two of them. They disagree about politics, about God, about the project of society—disagreements that hurt. But they love thrift stores, they love eating at diners, they love true crime, and they love each other. Jedidiah wants to step into Barbara’s world and get to know her in a way that occasional visits haven’t allowed.
They land on an idea: to retrace the thousands of miles Barbara trekked with Jedidiah’s father, travel writer Peter Jenkins, as part of the Walk Across America book trilogy that became a sensation in the 1970s. Beginning in New Orleans, they set off for the Oregon coast, listening to podcasts about outlaws and cult leaders—the only media they can agree on—while reliving the journey that changed Barbara’s life. Jedidiah discovers who Barbara was as a thirty-year-old writer walking across America and who she is now, as a parent who loves her son yet holds on to a version of faith that sees his sexuality as a sin.
Along the way, he peels back the layers of questions millions are asking today: How do we stay in relationship when it hurts? When do boundaries turn into separation? When do we stand up for ourselves, and when do we let it go?
Tender, smart, and profound, Mother, Nature is a story of a remarkable mother-son bond and a moving meditation on the complexities of love.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Part memoir, part travelogue, Mother, Nature follows the cross-country journey of a man and his mom as they navigate their thorny relationship and the open road. Author Jedidiah Jenkins and his devout mother, Barb, have polar-opposite views on almost everything, from his sexuality to the most basic science. Still, they decide to put that all aside and go on a road trip across America, recreating a journey Jedidiah’s now-divorced parents undertook decades before. Jenkins strikes a perfect balance: his writing is snappy and humorous, and he thoughtfully contemplates his parents’ mortality without getting glum. As mother and son reconcile and find shared interests during their cross-country adventure, Jenkins interrogates his complicated feelings with an inspiringly open heart and mind. If you’ve ever negotiated complex family relationships and pondered whether you can love someone in spite of near-insurmountable differences, you won’t want to miss Mother, Nature.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wilderness magazine editor Jenkins (To Shake the Sleeping Self) tackles his fraught relationship with his conservative mother in this affecting memoir. In the 1970s, Jenkins's parents, Peter and Barbara, who later divorced, became famous for walking across America and coauthoring a book about it. Clashes with Barbara over religion and politics impelled Jenkins, who is gay, to move from Nashville to L.A. in 2002 when he was 19; in his 30s, he came to fear that, if he continued seeing his mother just twice a year, he might only see her 12 more times before she died. After several planned vacations (including a Glenn Beck–led history cruise from Italy to Israel) were thwarted by the pandemic, Jenkins and his mother decided to retrace Barbara's cross-country walk in 2021. Along the way, they argued about homosexuality ("I think homosexuality... is a spiritual deception"), discussed Barbara and Peter's divorce, and confirmed that one thing mother and son did share is a fierce mutual love. Jenkins's vivid, admiring depiction of Barbara—a woman who loves God, her son, and true crime podcasts with near-equal passion—is wonderfully multidimensional, and his acceptance of their differences lends the memoir an air of maturity. The result is a moving ode to a complicated mother-son bond.
