Greyhound: A Memoir [Paperback]

Finalist for the NBCC Award for Criticism

Combining history, reportage, and nature writing with intimate moments of reflection, Greyhound tells of the journey from miscarriage to parenthood, and the purpose creativity gives to our lives when we feel purposeless

In 2006, in the wake of several miscarriages, Joanna Pocock traveled by Greyhound bus across the United States from Detroit to Los Angeles. Seventeen years later, she undertakes the same journey, revisiting the cities, edgelands, highways, and motels in the footsteps of the few women writers—Simone de Beauvoir, Ethel Mannin, and Irma Kurtz—who also chronicled their road trips across the United States. Combining memoir, reportage, environmental writing, and literary criticism, Greyhound is a moving and immersive book that captures an America in the throes of late capitalism with all its beauty, horror, and complexity.Finalist for the NBCC Award for Criticism
Literary Hub, A Most Anticipated Book of the Year

An engaging combination of the profound and the profane—much like the country Pocock traverses. —Bridget Bentz, NPR

It is a testament to Pocock’s subtlety and skill that Greyhound can do so much without flashing neon signs over the various points it makes. Transitioning with deceptively light grace through its many significant subjects, the book flows like scenery past a windshield . . . Lyrical and clear-eyed at once, Pocock has reinvented the road-trip genre for a new age. —Melissa Holbrook Pierson, The Washington Post

The Great American Road Trip, that idealized trek heading west, might be different now, according to author Pocock, who first made that journey in 2006 from Detroit to Los Angeles in the waklÃj