In 2006, Joanna Pocock decided to travel from east to west across the U.S. in a Greyhound bus as she mourned her miscarriages. Seventeen years later, at the start of 2023, and now in her midfifties, Pocock undertook the same journey again. Pocock follows in the wake of Simone de Beauvoir, Ethel Mannin, and Irma Kurtz, who all chronicled their travels across America. Exploring the intersection between capitalism and geography—urban, suburban and rural—and the impact of our relationship to the landscape, she zeroes in on the rivers of tarmac, the gas stations, the suburbs, and the sites of extraction created specifically for our twenty-first-century lifestyles, and their unintended environmental and social consequences. By revisiting the same cities, edgelands, roads, and motels in 2023 as she did in 2006, Pocock dissects the overlap between place and memory, between an earlier, more prosperous version of the United States and one mired in extreme poverty, drug addiction, and a larger division between the wealthy and the dispossessed.
Ambitious and earnest. In this westward journey, Pocock seeks not fortune, success, or survival, but connection, in all senses of the word: for her own sake but also, more urgently, as a balm for America’s pervasive ills to which her bus ride grants her a front-row seat.
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. It encompasses inner journey, feminist critique, engaging travelogue, examination of literary predecessors ... Lyrical and clear-eyed at once, Pocock has reinvented the road-trip genre for a new age.
It uses its ecological consciousness to direct readers’ attentions to the natural world, thoughtfully probes the boundaries of its own awareness, and honestly struggles to achieve a comfortable sense of place ... It ends with a pledge to continue cultivating a sense of belonging and a feeling that, for Joanna Pocock, 'home' may involve a set of ongoing practices rather than something she achieves once and for all.
