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JOYRIDE was published in Spain almost two years ago and has since become a huge success there. Due to economic changes in the American publishing industry, I have taken the risk of publishing JOYRIDE on my own here in the United States. I am most grateful to the hundreds of thousands of GOD ON A HARLEY fans who have written to me, wanting to know whatever happened to Christine Moore and asking to witness more of her spiritual journey. I know you are out there and I wrote this sequel for you.
In JOYRIDE, Christine has done some serious spiritual backsliding over the last ten years. These days, she is married to a ‘semi-famous’ musician whose career is suddenly on the skids. Now the financially strapped, middle-aged mother of two, Christine grudgingly finds that she must return to full-time work as a registered nurse.
The demands of family and career have taken an enormous toll on Christine’s sense of well-being. Her schedule is packed so tight, that she does the grocery shopping in the middle of the night because that is her only ‘free time’.
Then, on one of her late-night excursions to the supermarket, she runs into Joe again … and everything changes.
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Digestive Violence
If you have been beating yourself up with food and wondering why you can't seem to leave (the table, that is), then you have come to the right place.
"Quite possibly you don't have a problem with food; you have a problem with relationships," says Joan Brady, registered nurse and best-selling author of the groundbreaking new book, Digestive Violence, "and it is your relationship with food that needs to change."
Using the domestic violence model as a guide, Joan Brady exposes some surprising similarities between our behavior with food and our behavior with people. She points out that both battering and overeating involve a loss of control, a surrender of our personal power, and shattered self-esteem. The only obvious difference, she says, is that, in the case of the overeater, the victim and the perpetrator are the same person.
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in trouble for telling the truth. That is what led me to the secret discovery that putting my thoughts and ideas on paper would allow me to express myself freely and without the threat of ruler-reddened knuckles.
In 1963, I won a story-writing competition between the seventh and eighth grades at our school, and I still have the faded certificate signed by Mrs. Monaci to prove it. I don’t remember what my story was about, but it’s probably safe to assume it had to do with a personal issue of some kind. I always write about my personal problems – it’s how I resolve them – and it’s a never-ending source of ideas for future books.
Somewhere along the line, I decided to become a registered nurse and graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in nursing from William Paterson College in 1972. For more than twenty years, I worked in large, inner-city hospitals all across the country, usually on the ‘swing’ shift. I’ve always said that nursing is one of the only professions where you can experience every human emotion in just one eight-hour shift. The problem is that when you finally get home (around midnight in my case), you are still reeling from the adrenaline surge that got you through the night, and there is usually no one to talk to. Cranking up the stereo and doing aerobics was not an option. I lived in a rented room above a bar on the Jersey shore, and people with hangovers tend to get a bit testy, if you know what I mean. Fortunately, I turned to writing as a means of releasing those pent up feelings.
Over the years, I made the interesting observation that patients who had a strong belief in ‘God’ or a ‘Higher Power’ seemed to fare better than those of us who didn’t believe in anything at all. People with deep spiritual beliefs, it seemed, usually managed to find serenity in the face of terminal illness, and peace in the aftermath of sudden injury.
I wanted what those people had, but I was a ‘Catholic School Casualty’. I had been immunized against God with massive doses of fear, guilt, and rigid discipline. After witnessing so much human suffering in my work as a nurse, it gradually became impossible for me to believe in a benevolent God – if any God at all.
That is, until I looked at things from a different angle.
I asked myself, what would I do if I were God and I had to convince a non-believer like me that I do indeed exist? Well, for starters, I’d show up as a really good-looking guy, I decided. And I’d ride a Harley because that always gets a lot of attention. Hmmmm. What a cool fantasy. God on a Harley. It had a nice ring to it. I pulled out my pen and a yellow legal pad (I didn’t have a computer in those days) and started spinning a little fantasy.
I wrote GOD ON A HARLEY during the so-called commercials of my life: while waiting in line at the drive-up window at the bank, while pushing the medication cart down the hallway on the graveyard shift, and while waiting for my room to stop vibrating from the live band that played downstairs on weekends. You get the picture. It took about six months to complete the story and, amazingly, I felt much better every time I read it. Even more amazingly, I suddenly believed in God again. Though originally, it had not been my intention to publish GOD ON A HARLEY, it slowly dawned on me that if the story could do so much for me, perhaps it could help others as well.
The rest, as they say, is history. After six years of some pretty brutal rejections, GOD ON A HARLEY was finally published in 1995. Since then, it has been translated into seventeen languages and was optioned by Hollywood for a movie.
About a year later, I followed up that success with a sequel called, HEAVEN IN HIGH GEAR, a story about a woman with body image issues. Shortly after that, I wrote my first non-fiction work for people who have never been mothers, called, I DON’T NEED A BABY TO BE WHO I AM. Since I have never had children of my own, I wrote this book as a way of healing the conflict and disappointment I experienced surrounding this subject.
Relationships, self-esteem, and women’s issues continue to intrigue me, and my latest work, JOYRIDE, explores a woman’s intimate beliefs and fallacies regarding marriage. Lately, I’ve been struggling with my weight and my poor eating habits, so watch for a diet book from me very soon!
These days, I’m a full-time author and I live in California with my dog, Harley. I am living the life I always dreamed of and I now see my writing career as an extension of my nursing career: I try to inject faith, comfort, and a sense of wellness into the normal stresses of everyday life.
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