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Hey pals. This week, we savor the final moments of summer with the author of our favorite non-fiction book this year. Her name is Meaghan Garvey — you probably know her as one of the best music journalists in the game — and the book is Midwestern Death Trip, which chronicles a period where she purchased a used red Cadillac and spent her days driving to far-flung corners of rural Wisconsin, Michigan, and Illinois, drinking in taxidermy-adorned supper clubs and dive bars and trying to “re-enchant” her life. It’s part memoir, part outsider history of a place, and part on-the-ground reckoning with a part of America often flattened into political abstraction. Though, if you really wanna boil it down, it is — as Meaghan puts it — a manifesto.
We discuss Meaghan’s contention that American culture is actually way more interesting, psychedelic, and varied than it’s cracked up to be; what her weeklong benders taught her about both her relationship with herself and Americans’ relationships with one another; and what it’s like to occupy the lonely position of a female writer compared to Hunter S. Thompson (and why she’s actually more of a Lucia Berlin).
Purchase Midwestern Death Trip at Country Highway and at local booksellers (second edition forthcoming)
Subscribe to Meaghan’s excellent Substack SCARY COOL SAD GOODBYE
