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...