First published 2025
Joanna Pocock takes two cross-country Greyhound journeys separated by seventeen years. In 2006, she travels from east to west while grieving her miscarriages. In 2023, now in her mid-fifties and a mother, she retraces the same route. Pocock weaves together personal narrative, historical context, and environmental observation as she examines how America has changed between these two trips. She revisits identical cities, motels, and highways to document the shifts in American society and landscape. Her account explores how capitalism shapes geography, from urban centers to rural extraction sites. The author places herself in a tradition of women writers including Simone de Beauvoir, Ethel Mannin, and Irma Kurtz who documented their American travels. Through this dual journey, Pocock investigates the connections between personal memory and physical place, contrasting an earlier, more prosperous America with a nation now marked by extreme poverty and social division.
Genres: american-fiction, american, autobiography, contemporary, memoir, non-fiction, biography-memoir, 21st-century
Vibes: elegiac, intimate, lyrical, meditative, reflective, thought-provoking
Tropes: dual-timeline, parallel-narrative, return-journey, self-discovery
Setting: United States, America
Period: 2006, 2023, 21st century
400 pages · Paperback · Soft Skull
Content warnings: pregnancy-loss