Nowhere for very long The unexpected road to an unconventional life

Brianna Madia

Book - 2022

In this beautifully written, vividly detailed memoir, a young woman chronicles her adventures traveling across the deserts of the American West in an orange van named Bertha and reflects on an unconventional approach to life. A woman defined by motion, Brianna Madia bought a beat-up bright orange van, filled it with her two dogs Bucket and Dagwood, and headed into the canyons of Utah with her husband. Nowhere for Very Long is her deeply felt, immaculately told story of exploration - of the world outside and the spirit within. However, pursuing a life of intention isn't always what it seems. In fact, at times it was downright boring, exhausting, and even desperate - when Bertha overheated and she was forced to pull over on a lonely str...etch of South Dakota highway; when the weather was bitterly cold and her water jugs froze beneath her as she slept in the parking lot of her office; when she worried about money, her marriage, and the looming question mark of her future. But Brianna was committed to living a life true to herself, come what may, and that made all the difference. Nowhere for Very Long is the true story of a woman learning and unlearning, from backroads to breakdowns, from married to solo, and finally, from lost to found to lost again ... this time, on purpose.

Saved in:

2nd Floor Show me where

910.4/Madia
1 / 2 copies available
Location Call Number   Status
2nd Floor 910.4/Madia Checked In
2nd Floor 910.4/Madia Due May 5, 2024
Subjects
Genres
Autobiographies
Travel writing
Published
New York : HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers [2022]
Language
English
Main Author
Brianna Madia (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
260 pages ; 24 cm
ISBN
9780063047983
Contents unavailable.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Travel writer Madia recounts the highs and lows of life on the road in her quietly moving debut. As she writes, trading in just about everything for Bertha--her orange van with a "propensity for back roads and breakdowns"--made the difference between a humdrum life and a freewheeling lifestyle in which "fear was celebrated." In their early 20s, Madia and her future husband Neil left their middle-class Connecticut lives and decamped to Salt Lake City, Utah, in 2012. They later took their wayfaring a step further when they began to travel full-time in Madia's van around the western U.S. and Mexico with their dogs, Dagwood and Bucket. But with the captivating grandeur of the deserts and mountains--vividly depicted in Madia's elegant prose--came the struggles of nomadic living, too: after Neil accidentally ran over Dagwood (who eventually recovered), Madia's marriage began to crack, and a couple years later they divorced, leaving the author to continue her travels solo with the dogs. Madia's insights drill deep, as does her knack for carving beauty out of pain ("Perhaps what Neil and I had was something meant to be left out in the wildest parts of the desert like the sun-bleached bones of a once-living thing"). Armchair adventurers will be inspired by this spirited story. (Apr.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved