Holding the Moon

For fans of Easy Beauty by Chloe Cooper Jones, a memoir about a woman paralyzed at seventeen who spends four decades unlearning the “disease to please” that’s been quietly running her life—and finding her way, at last, to forgiveness.

At seventeen, Elizabeth Fetter fell forty feet from a tree and became a paraplegic as soon as she hit the ground. For the next seventeen years she built an extraordinary life—Paralympic athlete, White House Fellow, advocate—while burying the grief and resentment underneath it. Then she witnessed a drowning on a wilderness canoe trip, and it cracked her open.

Holding the Moon is the story of what came after: the decades of inner work it took Elizabeth to face her depression, name the “disease to please” that had shaped her choices, and find a way to let go of the resentments holding her back from happiness.

Moving from a New Hampshire tennis camp to the Paralympic Games, the Carter White House, and the Utah mountains—and through marriage and motherhood—Holding the Moon is a meditation on the loss and serenity, grief and grace, that Fetter has experienced as an individual living with a disability.