Released 14.11.25

The Conversation

Greyhound — just published by Fitzcarraldo Editions — will hopefully become one of this podcast’s most popular reads: a visceral, deeply-felt anatomy of America told by Joanna Pocock.

Based on two, interwoven cross-continent journeys by Greyhound bus, it fits (loosely) inside the genre of the classic American road trip. Except instead of romance, we’re confronted with ecocide; instead of a love story, we’re challenged by the reality of an addiction epidemic. Refusing to be locked in by redemptive arcs, Joanna weaves memoir with reportage, environmental writing with lyricism, and dislocation with an empathetic reach for our common humanity. 

Joanna’s route takes her from Detroit to Albuquerque, Vegas and Los Angeles. She weaves personal grief with incisive passages on age, femininity, and the social rot in the ‘application’ of travel. 

“I hate being told what to do,” says Joanna; “I like just exploring. I like allowing life and exchanges and coincidence to somehow influence how I travel and how I move through space. The minute it becomes digitised, someone is telling me what to do and where to go, and it's based on my algorithms, my previous searches. It's based on advertising. It's based on where they want me to go again. I just I find that terrifying.” 

Above all, she is generous about her approach and techniques, but then not only is she a novelist and prize-winning author, but an experienced teacher of creative writing. It is her artful braiding of two periods of time — “one trip was about fleeing in 2006; the other was a pilgrimage of sorts, in 2023” — that delivers a masterclass in narrative non-fiction storytelling.

“A book like Greyhound needed decades of work and honing the craft and thinking hard about different genres,” says Joanna: “This is all big stuff, and I think it's really important that writers talk about this side of it, the work side. Because it doesn't come easily.” 

Image: copyright Joanna Pocock

Books discussed:

Joanna Pocock
— Greyhound
— Surrender

William Least Heat-Moon
— Blue Highways

Aldo Leopold
— A Sand County Almanac 

John Steinbeck
— Travels with Charley: In Search of America 

James Rorty
— Where Life is Better: An Unsentimental American Journey

Henry Miller
— The Air-Conditioned Nightmare

Simone de Beauvoir
— America Day by Day

Ethel Mannin
— An American Journey 

Irma Kurtz
— The Great American Bus Ride 

Heather McCalden
— The Observable Universe