Review
Title: East Winds: A Global Quest to Reckon with Marriage
Author: Rachel Rueckert
Publisher: By Common Consent
Genre: Memoir
Year Published: 2022
Number of Pages: 344
Binding: Hardcover or Paperback
ISBN-13: 978-1948218627
Price: Hardback, $31.49; Paperback, $12.95
Reviewed by Dan Call for the Association for Mormon Letters
No matter whether she’s on the run from packs of stray Amazonian dogs in the middle of the night, doing dishes at 11,000 feet above sea level, or breaking down in tears as she discovers that the mother of all walking trails is going to be more even demanding than she first thought, Rachel Rueckert sees meaning in each fragment of her year-long honeymoon odyssey around the globe. In East Winds: A Global Quest to Reckon with Marriage, she skillfully dives into her past, finding stories that shed light on her ongoing concerns about the project of marriage. Her intentionality with naming and applying her interpretive filters – as an educator, an ethnographer, a lifelong member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a witness to her own parents’ divorce, a newlywed, and a passionate wanderluster – makes for an addicting read.
One of her motives for the trip is to piece together a more global picture of what marriage could be, based on the practices and perspectives she gathers everywhere she goes. This facet of the narrative is fascinating, if for nothing else than for the ethnographic perspective that she deploys so effortlessly. Without feeling like the author is trying to walk a tightrope, East Winds… lovingly describes marriage practices that probably clash with mainstream Mormon sensibilities. Rueckert’s emic lens during these sections of the book was an instant win with me, as she skillfully presents alternatives that trouble the notion of “traditional marriage.”
In addition to my love for travel and a BA in anthropology, there were personal reasons I jumped at the chance to read and review this book. Having recently completed two decades of marriage, I’d like to think that I have learned something through all the joys and sorrows my partner and I have shared. At another level, though, there’s so much I don’t know about marriage. As a cishet male who has lived his entire life in the church, and in the U.S. I have the privilege of remaining blind to the ways in which matrimony benefits me. Although the book is about Rueckert’s journey, I couldn’t help but let my attention often wander to Austin. I found myself wanting to compare myself to him, sometimes understanding and wanting to explain his actions, sometimes shaking my head in regret as I recall making similar missteps. His need to mediate problems that have nothing to do with him, his unflinching faith that everything will work out fine, his emotional distance. All of these things felt incredibly familiar to me and were no doubt at least partially cultivated by the common denominators of our upbringing in the church, with messages and programs that propped us up and developed us as leaders and doers. She puzzles over him, owning her feelings, treating him with grace that only love can bestow.
And even now, having finished East Winds and standing at the end of the world with Rueckert, trying to make sense of this all (and contemplating making my own pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago), I’m startled by the power of her writing. Before I finished the stirring dedication, I was already processing feelings of danger, discomfort, and threat, wondering what sorts of conclusions she would reach, and what, if any, generalizations she might make that undermine my own complicity with marriage. If you experience any of the same emotions, tame your lizard brain and overcome your fight-or-flight impulses. The cost of admission is worth the ride, and your ego might take a beating, but your soul will get expanded.