Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Don’t Think Twice
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/2102828/barbara-schoichet * https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/barbara-schoichet/dont-think-twice-adventure/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Lancaster University (England), Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Previously, worked as a publicity writer.
AVOCATIONS:Riding motorcycles.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Barbara Schoichet is a writer based in New York City. Previously, she worked as a publicity writer. She studied creative writing at Lancaster University, England, earning a Ph.D. in the subject. In her free time, she enjoys motorcycling. Schoichet has written nonfiction books. Her first book, released in 1994, is The New Single Woman: Discovering a Life of Her Own. In this volume Schoichet interviews American women who are single. The women reveal the challenges they face on a day-to-day basis.
Schoichet’s following book, Don’t Think Twice: Adventure and Healing at 100 Miles per Hour, was published in 2016. This volume is a memoir of a lengthy motorcycle trip she took during a midlife crisis of sorts. Schoichet had experienced a particularly difficult year. Her mother died, she lost her job in publicity writing, and she broke up with her long-term girlfriend. Schoichet was falling into a deep depression and recognized that she needed to to something to avoid sinking deeper into her anguish. She decided to buy a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and ride it across the country. Schoichet began her journey in Buffalo, New York, and rode all the way to Los Angeles, California. The trip took her three weeks. In the book Schoichet describes some of the colorful characters she met along the way. She also recalls riding through an intense rainstorm, taking her bike up to one hundred miles per hour, staying in cheap motels, and visiting tourist sites, including Graceland, in Memphis, Tennessee, and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Throughout the volume, Schoichet includes stories about her past and about her sisters and her mother, whom she still mourns. She suggests that the long journey offered her a new perspective on her life and helped her to begin healing.
Whitney Scott, a reviewer in Booklist, commented: “Often surprising, witty, and thoughtful, this is a bittersweet and entertaining read.” A Publishers Weekly writer described Don’t Think Twice as “uneven.” However, the same writer concluded: “The memoir stands as a monument to self-confidence and self-direction [and] to doing what you feel compelled to do.” A contributor to Kirkus Reviews Online remarked: “Schoichet’s account will resonate with bikers, . . . but others may find the narrative overly self-indulgent and long.” The same contributor called the book “an all-inclusive and honest account.” Cathy Ritchie, a critic on the GLBT Reviews Web site, praised Schoichet’s descriptions of the people she met on her journey. Ritchie asserted: “Thanks to the author’s skillful dialogue and scene-setting, these folks consistently come alive and keep the narrative humorous and thoughtful.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, August 1, 2016, Whitney Scott, review of Don’t Think Twice: Adventure and Healing at 100 Miles per Hour, p. 16.
Publishers Weekly, June 20, 2016, review of Don’t Think Twice, p. 148.
ONLINE
GLBT Reviews, http://www.glbtrt.ala.org/ (August 23, 2016), Cathy Ritchie, review of Don’t Think Twice.
Kirkus Reviews Online, https://www.kirkusreviews.com/ (June 22, 2016), review of Don’t Think Twice.
Penguin Random House Web site, http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/ (April 9, 2017), author profile.
Photo: © (c) Nancy Borowick
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Barbara Schoichet has a Ph.D. in creative writing from Lancaster University in England. An avid biker, she’s owned (and wrecked) several motorcycles and logged more than ten thousand miles, including the nearly four-thousand-mile journey chronicled in Don’t Think Twice.
QUOTED: "Often surprising, witty, and thoughtful, this is a bittersweet and entertaining read."
Don't Think Twice: Adventure and Healing at 100 Miles per Hour
Whitney Scott
Booklist. 112.22 (Aug. 1, 2016): p16.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Listen
Full Text:
Don't Think Twice: Adventure and Healing at 100 Miles per Hour. By Barbara Schoichet. Sept. 2016.336p. Putnam, $26 (9781101981801). 818.
At 50, Schoichet loses her job, her girlfriend of six years, and her mother, all within six months. Her method of healing is to travel 4,000 miles across America on her newly acquired used Harley. In this chronicle of a midlife-crisis road trip, Schoichet describes tackling physical and emotional challenges on the open highway, sometimes at 100 mph, "navigating back to ... life" via various adventures in which she overcame inexperience and overconfidence (at one point, a police officer made her view a grisly accident as a warning). In Gatlinburg, she dines on cashews and moonshine, agitated by a fisherman's repeatedly unsuccessful casts: "I needed him to prove something elusive could be caught ... the creature had become everything that had gotten away from me." Schoichet believes "four wheels move the body; two wheels move the soul." Often surprising, witty, and thoughtful, this is a bittersweet and entertaining read. --Whitney Scott
QUOTED: "uneven."
"The memoir stands as a monument to self-confidence and self-direction arid to doing what you feel compelled to do."
Don't Think Twice
Publishers Weekly. 263.25 (June 20, 2016): p148.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Listen
Full Text:
Don't Think Twice
Barbara Schoichet. Putnam, $26 (336p) ISBN 978-1-101-98180-1
In this uneven memoir about buying a motorcycle and taking off on a cross-country joyride at age 50, Schoichet comes across as that friend whom you never found particularly interesting who surprises you by suddenly going big. She is coming off a series of bad turns--a break-up with her girlfriend, her mother's death, and the loss of her job--which seems to give her permission to do something just because she really wants to do it. She buys her first motorcycle in New York and rides it home to L.A. Schoichet is hard-pressed to make this superficially interesting narrative come to life. She has a mystical experience at the battlefield of Gettysburg that she struggles to describe beyond the word "amazing." More famous sites are seen (Graceland was "bizarre"), pizza is ordered, and crummy motel rooms are found, but it is beyond her grasp to capture the spirits of the people and communities she finds, or her own feelings about living on the road. Still, the memoir stands as a monument to self-confidence and self-direction arid to doing what you feel compelled to do, even when people cluck and you can't explain to yourself why you're doing it. Agent: Linda Chester, Linda Chester Literary. (Sept.)
QUOTED: "Schoichet’s account will resonate with bikers … but others may find the narrative overly self-indulgent and long."
"an all-inclusive and honest account."
DON'T THINK TWICE
Adventure and Healing at 100 Miles Per Hour
by Barbara Schoichet
BUY NOW FROM
AMAZON
BARNES & NOBLE
LOCAL BOOKSELLER
GET WEEKLY BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS:
Email Address
Enter email
Subscribe
Email this review
KIRKUS REVIEW
How a cross-country motorcycle ride helped the author combat severe depression.
“We’ve all had them—those unbelievably bad years in which one thing after another happens, and we begin to think that something greater than ourselves is trying to tell us something,” writes Schoichet. “In my case, it seemed like I was taunting disaster, because before my life went to hell, I was completely unaware I was heading for a storm.” In less than a year, she lost her job as a publicity writer at a major studio, her girlfriend of six years, and her mother. Devastated by these events, the author knew she had to do something daring in order to get on with her life. So she bought a Harley-Davidson online and decided to ride it from Buffalo to Los Angeles. She figured she’d either die on the highway or learn how to live again. Schoichet fills her memoir of her three-week adventure with sketches of the helpful, crazy, and sometimes-creepy characters she met on her journey—e.g., the group of Harley riders who surrounded her when she stopped to stretch her legs on the side of the road and the woman who took care of her after arriving at a motel in a terrible rainstorm, among many others. The author interweaves stories of her mother and her sisters into the details of her life on the road as she tries to gain perspective on everything that happened in the past, and although she didn’t necessarily find a state of Zen, the ride was definitely therapeutic. Schoichet’s account will resonate with bikers and with those who have always wondered what it feels like to go 100 miles per hour on a motorcycle, but others may find the narrative overly self-indulgent and long.
An all-inclusive and honest account of how one woman used a motorcycle journey to come to grips with painful events in her life.
Pub Date: Sept. 6th, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-98180-1
Page count: 336pp
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 22nd, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1st, 2016
QUOTED: "Thanks to the author’s skillful dialogue and scene-setting, these folks consistently come alive and keep the narrative humorous and thoughtful."
Book review: Don’t Think Twice: Adventure and Healing at 100 Miles Per Hour, by Barbara Schoichet
Schoichet Dont Think TwiceSchoichet, Barbara. Don’t Think Twice: Adventure and Healing at 100 Miles Per Hour. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2016. HC $26.00. ISBN 978-1101981801.
At age 50, within a six-month period, the author loses her mother to pancreatic cancer, her job, and her long-time girlfriend. At such an excruciating personal crossroads, Schoichet decides to heal and find life’s meaning on the road, from New York to Los Angeles, via Route 66—on the back of a Harley. She takes fortunate readers along for the ride.
“Travelogue memoirs” are rarely my reading genre of choice, as I often find them tedious if not painfully boring. But Schoichet keeps naysayers such as I fully engrossed via her keen descriptive powers, especially of the myriad bona fide “characters” she encounters along the way—-from her doom-and-gloom “Don’t be stupid!” motorcycle instructor to numerous grizzled motel front-desk clerks, to world-weary waitresses and bar stool denizens. Thanks to the author’s skillful dialogue and scene-setting, these folks consistently come alive and keep the narrative humorous and thoughtful.
Along the way, Schoichet also deals with family pressures, as per her status as the youngest of four close-knit sisters, and copes with the lingering aftermaths of her parents’ deaths. The occasions when she thinks she actually sees her late mother and father in graveyards and other historic locales become a bit Twilight-Zone-ish for my tastes, but those are relatively brief interludes in a journey that maintains reader interest till the end.
As she puts it: “I felt that my three-week motorcycle trek was a rebellion of sorts, a way of thumbing my nose at grief, and turning up the volume to my all-but-silenced life…..I didn’t have a death wish, but I didn’t have a life wish, either.” Schoichet’s weeks on the road bring her closure and, obviously, many fine stories to share.
This book is recommended for LGBT biography/memoir and general travel collections.
Cathy Ritchie
Acquisitions/Selection Services
Dallas (TX) Public Library