Mother, Nature

September 4, 2023
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. Agent: Bryan Norman, Alive Literary. (Nov.)This review has been updated with further information.