Driven: A White-Knuckled Ride to Heartbreak and Back

For fans of Wild, a searing memoir about one woman's road to hope following the death of her troubled brother, told through the series of cars that accompanied her

Growing up in a blue-collar family in the Midwest, Melissa Stephenson longed for escape. Her wanderlust was an innate reaction to the powerful personalities around her, and came too from her desire to find a place in the world where her artistic ambitions wouldn't be thwarted. She found in automobiles the promise of a future beyond Indiana state lines.

From a lineage of secondhand family cars of the late '60s, to the Honda that carried her from Montana to Texas as her new marriage disintegrated, to the '70s Ford she drove away from her brother's house after he took his life (leaving Melissa the truck, a dog, and a few mixed tapes), to the VW van she now uses to take her kids camping, she knows these cars better than she knows some of the people closest to her. Driven away from grief, and toward hope, Melissa reckons with what it means to lose a beloved sibling.

Driven is a powerful story of healing, for all who have had to look back at pain to see how they can now move forward.

"What a thrill to ride shotgun with Melissa Stephenson, ‘Werewolves of London’ blasting as she takes us along on a keen-eyed, big-hearted, and quintessentially American road-trip to self-discovery and a deeper understanding of her late, troubled, and charismatic older brother." Rob Spillman, author of All Tomorrow’s Parties

"A coming-of-age memoir about wanderlust, grief, and perseverance, Stephenson’s first book packs an emotional wallop...Readers of grief memoirs will especially want to seek this out, but so should anyone looking for a story of finding strength in oneself." Booklist

"Driven is an edgy memoir of cars, crises, and coming of age...[it's] worth reading for a quality more difficult to portray in dust jacket copy: being in the hands of a real writer and watching the mastery of craft on the page as [Stephenson] condenses and expands the moments of ordinary life into story, casting for insight and meaning...It's clear we're in the hands of a professional...[she] sets a scene so we feel like we’re inside her skin...Stephenson exploits the bread and butter of memoir — parsing childhood experiences and complicated family dynamics — but Driven also explores edgier, more experimental terrain...Both the irony, and the beauty, of this book is that it isn’t so much a story about her brother at all. This story is hers." Texas Observer

"Wanderlust is instilled in Stephenson from a young age, and cars both enable her spirit of adventure and allow her to get at intangible emotions while dealing with very tangible objects…Moving…We need more stories from women like [this]…[who] crave new experiences and knowledge, and are frank about the compromises they have to make for their families." Outside

MELISSA STEPHENSON earned her B.A. in English from the University of Montana and her M.F.A. in fiction from Texas State University. Her writing has appeared in publications such as The Rumpus, the Washington Post, ZYZZYVA, and Fourth Genre. Driven is her first book. She lives in Missoula, Montana, with her two kids.

The year I graduated from high school, my writing teacher thwacked a finger on my 200 pages of essays and poems and said, “Maybe you’ll write the next On the Road, but from a female perspective. Someone needs to do that.” As soon as he said that, I realized how many of the travel narratives I loved were written by and about men...

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