Driven

April 9, 2018
Rather than render her road story with the usual perils and pleasures of travel, Stephenson builds her memoir around the automobiles that transported her through a life of wanderlust. The book opens with Stephenson embarking on a road trip in 2000 in her brother Matthew’s 1970s Ford truck after he committed suicide days earlier. From there she recalls her blue-collar childhood in the 1970s Midwest and her life as a single mother living in Montana; the different makes and models of her automobiles provide a solid touchstone for recounting time, place, and the economic and emotional circumstances of her life. Stephenson combs her memories of the various autos: the VW Squarebacks (“Volkswagens, like tattoos, build character”), a 1984 Saab (“The two years I owned her I... so busy exercising my freedom that Matthew and I rarely saw each other”), and a 1988 Honda Civic (“In one short decade, we’d bootstrapped our way over the poverty line and into a facsimile of a middle-class lifestyle”). Stephenson insightfully maps her family history with tales of strife and love; her beloved brother’s mental illness and suicide; her marriage, motherhood, and divorce; and finally finding her voice as a writer. Stephenson’s memoir offers a rewarding twist on an American story, and is filled with love, grief, grit, and healing.

Starred review from May 1, 2018
A debut memoir that explores a woman's relationship with her family and dead brother through the cars that came into their lives.Vehicles seemed to mark every major event in Indiana native Stephenson's family. Her father began dating her mother just after he bought a used Chevy; her mother lost both her father and beloved boyfriend to automobile accidents; and her younger brother Matthew was born just after her parents settled on a Toyota sedan to replace the Fiat Stephenson's father had bought on a whim. Later, after Matthew committed suicide in 2000, the author took possession of his truck, "the only thing of material value my brother left behind." The author begins the book around the time of her childhood, before her parents "bootstrapped [their] way over the poverty line and into a facsimile of a middle-class lifestyle." Her most important relationship was with Matthew, whose love/hate feelings for her were "complicated at best." Their shared desire to escape the Midwest took them on road trips and to schools outside Indiana and brought them into contact with the vehicles--Saabs, Fords, Vanagons--that defined their respective youths. But where Stephenson's travels led to her finding a stable husband and her calling as a writer, Matthew's travels led down dark roads that included alcohol and drug abuse and a brief, destructive marriage to Corey Parks, the notorious bass player for Nashville Pussy. Yet no one in the family knew just how troubled her brother was until he took his life. Shaken to the core, Stephenson freed herself from the wreckage of Matthew's suicide by driving straight into the heart of family dysfunction and coming to terms with the unwitting role she and her family had played in his death. Lyrical and eloquent, Stephenson's book is a journey of pain, beauty, and healing that also celebrates the life of her tragically misunderstood brother.Raw, tender, and uniquely envisioned.

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