If you were paying attention in the late 2000s, you noticed the byline “Liz Jewett” pop up in several local publications, including the Richmond Times-Dispatch and Richmond Magazine. But, even as she was making inroads in the local journalism scene, the writer behind the byline who now goes by her married name, Elizabeth Becker, was coming to some hard realizations.
“I realized within the first couple of years out of college that writing as a full-time profession was very difficult,” Becker says, who received her degree in creative writing from the College of Charleston in 2008.
“There was a recession going on and I was living with my parents, and I realized this is not going to work. I was putting so much pressure on myself that I thought that I might start to hate writing.”
She ultimately pursued a second career in nursing, graduating from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2013 and starting work as a pediatric nurse. “I had a couple friends who went to nursing school,” Becker says. “And honestly, knowing how stable it was is what really drew me to it in the first place, that it was one of the few professions where you’re almost guaranteed a job.”
Becker never let go of her love of writing though, and her debut novel, “The Moonlight Healers,” was published earlier this month. She says the book is meant to be a tribute to nurses: “I dedicated the book to them. I wanted it to be a love letter to nurses and their role as healers.”
“The Moonlight Healers” starts in Richmond with a horrible car accident involving nurse Louise Winston and her boyfriend, Peter. After crawling out of the car, she finds her boyfriend critically wounded without a pulse. When she starts administering CPR, a mysterious energy flows through her hands and Peter miraculously revives.
As Louise begins to grapple with the repercussions of the incident, the narrative switches to France during World War II, and the reader discovers that Louise’s grandmother was also a nurse who had an inexplicable healing power.
“Healers” has already received praise for its combination of magical realism, romance, and historical fiction. Becker says she didn’t set out to write magical realism.
“I think the magic came from wanting to write a story about healing, and a lot of it was a kind of wish fulfillment,” she says. “There were times as a nurse that I was thinking, ‘what if you had this kind of superpower where you could actually put your hands on someone and take away their pain? What would that mean to have that ability and would it be as straightforward as you think to be able to cure people?’”
Becker is now a mother of four children and lives in Charlottesville. She wrote parenting columns for Richmond magazine as recently as 2022 but stealing moments to write has been a consistent challenge. “I’ve never been able to have a set writing schedule,” she says. “I actually wrote a lot of the book in my car after dropping off my youngest at preschool. I would stay in the parking lot and write because it gave me a little more time if I didn’t try to drive home.”
In the couple of weeks since the book came out, Becker has been most excited by the response of people working in healthcare.
“At some of the events I’ve done, people have come up and said they’re buying a book for their sister who’s a nurse or their cousin who’s a nurse,” she says. “That was always the intention, hoping it would find either nurses or people involved in a healthcare setting. So the fact that it’s connected with them has been very cool.”
Author Elizabeth Becker will be appearing at Fountain Books on Wednesday, Feb. 26 at 6 p.m. (free but registration required) and at the Barnes and Nobles at Libbie Place on Saturday, March 1, from 1 to 3 p.m. Her complete book tour details available here.
