Astronaut Obsession

In Eliana Ramage’s debut novel, To the Moon and Back, Steph Harper is a queer Cherokee girl whose sole ambition is to become the first Cherokee astronaut. Ramage, who is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, manages a beautiful feat with the book, writing straight into the relentless way women — particularly women whose identities are anything other than white and heterosexual — must work to succeed in a man’s world. Within that story, she layers the complicated, ever-changing needs, joys, responsibilities, losses, and difficult choices of a deeply ambitious woman across more than three decades of her life.

Steph first considers life beyond planet Earth at age 6, when her mother, Hannah, flees violence in Texas with Steph and Steph’s little sister, Kayla. The car ride is fraught for reasons the daughters will only understand later, but Steph takes comfort in the moon, which illuminates the long, dark road to Oklahoma. Hannah claims their new home in Tahlequah as the site of her ancestors’ proud Cherokee heritage, all the while keeping past family secrets from Steph and Kayla. As a teenager and college student, Steph comes into her queer identity but struggles to proudly claim her Native American one. Consider her contemplation of leaving home:

And I wouldn’t be Indian. Right then, the Nation felt like a hand pressing down on my chest.

How easy it would be — or at least how possible, looking how I looked — to let that part of me fall away. To, absurd as it sounded even to me — opt out?

To be an astronaut — to be myself — without the weight of everything that came before.

Kayla, on the other hand, becomes an outspoken advocate for Indigenous people as a social media influencer and activist. She’s aligned in young adulthood with Steph’s college girlfriend, Della Owens, who was removed as a baby from her Cherokee family by Mormons through a challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act. Della initially felt conflicted about her lesbian identity, and though Steph loves her, she struggles to see Della’s full humanity, blinded as she is to the needs of her loved ones by all things NASA.

The novel tracks the rising tensions between Steph’s astronaut obsession and the fight for justice the women around her willingly take up. The tensions come to a head when Steph’s singular space dreams directly threaten Kayla’s activism.

Ramage’s choice of a polyphonic point of view is effective in characterizing Steph — the main narrator — in the context of her close relationships, and it is essential in characterizing Della, an introvert whose depth the often-presumptuous Steph sometimes misses. Where Steph is narrow and dogged in her view of what constitutes a good life, Della is more flexible and expansive, if quieter about what she wants. It is in Della’s interiority that the reader perceives her complexity in ways Steph cannot:

Every year of my new adulthood, I thought, I would choose something, and I would un-choose something else, and the outline of that other woman I hadn’t chosen to become would stand close to me, breathing softly at my shoulder, her hand gentle on the small of my back.

That “I thought” is key to Della’s character; she processes her life’s path, and her agency in walking that path, internally. Had Ramage chosen to render the above passage in dialogue, it would not feel true to Della’s nature. Thus, the book’s multiple perspectives create dramatic irony while adding a layer of meaning to the story. To the Moon and Back is not only about one woman’s ambitions, but about the fallout of those ambitions on a community of women.