Review
Title: East Winds: A Global Quest to Reckon with Marriage
Author: Rachel Rueckert
Publisher: By Common Consent Press
Genre: Memoir
Year Published: 2022
Number of Pages: 344
ISBN-13: 978-1948218627
Price: Hardback, $31.49; Paperback, $12.95
Reviewed by Liz Busby, August 2023
When she set out on a honeymoon that spans the globe, Rachel Rueckert gifted herself with the perfect set-up for an introspective memoir about the significance of marriage in various cultures, her own Latter-day Saint culture, and her own life. Her writing interleaves her current adventures as a newly-wed trying to travel the globe from hostel to hostel in countries where she doesn’t speak the language, stories from her childhood struggling with an unstable mother and her parents’ eventual divorce, and more general sociological thoughts about the significance of marriage and gender roles and stories.
If that sounds like a lot for one book, it certainly can be at times. Rachel’s book is packed from wall to wall with significant ideas and stories both humorous and painful. Sometimes it took me a while as a reader to get the information that made previous stories made sense; I found myself arguing with the author’s opinions only to have a key experience revealed 50 pages later that made all the difference to my empathy. I don’t think it is a flaw, necessarily, just a recognition that everyone’s story has to start somewhere yet can’t make sense without all the pieces you don’t yet know. In that way, the form of the book echoes its themes about how marriage puts together two individuals who can never fully know each other or be fully compatible, about how this type of partnership works best when we are forgiving even when we can’t understand our differences, because it’s hard enough to understand ourselves.
I expected this book to be a little more universal in its themes, but it ended up being a very personal journey. I feel like I understand better where Rachel (and others who share similar growing up experiences with marriage and trust) are coming from when they question LDS norms about marriage, even though this book doesn’t reflect my own experiences (either growing up or in the past). Perhaps the best thing I can say about this book is that it makes the case for not treating “Mormon marriage” as a thing, because there is no Mormon marriage, but ultimately many, many Mormon marriages, all composed of unique individuals with their own experiences, even when they share some aspects of culture and context.