Contemporary Authors

• Driven: A White-Knuckled Ride to Heartbreak and Back ( memoir) Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Boston, NA), 2018

1. Driven : a White-Knuckled Ride to Heartbreak and Back LCCN 2018009677 Type of material Book Personal name Stephenson, Melissa (Creative Writer), author. Main title Driven : a White-Knuckled Ride to Heartbreak and Back / Melissa Stephenson. Published/Produced Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018. Projected pub date 1807 Description 1 online resource. ISBN 9781328768308 () Item not available at the Library. Why not? 2. Driven : a White-Knuckled Ride to Heartbreak and Back LCCN 2017045349 Type of material Book Personal name Stephenson, Melissa (Creative Writer), author. Main title Driven : a White-Knuckled Ride to Heartbreak and Back / Melissa Stephenson. Published/Produced Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018. Projected pub date 1807 Description pages cm ISBN 9781328768292 (hardback) Item not available at the Library. Why not?

• Melissa Stephensen - https://melissa-stephenson.squarespace.com/about-1/

  Melissa Stephenson earned her B.A. in English from The University of Montana and her M.F.A. in Fiction from Texas State University. Her writing has appeared in publications such as The Rumpus, The Washington Post, Barrelhouse, Mutha, Blackbird, and Fourth Genre. Her memoir, Driven, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in July of 2018. She lives in Missoula, Montana with her two kids.

• Missoula Independent - https://missoulanews.com/entertainment/missoula-writer-melissa-stephenson-talks-addiction-resilience-cars-and-her/article_6b37ac34-8acb-11e8-a7c3-1f83e889ad9c.html

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  Missoula writer Melissa Stephenson talks addiction, resilience, cars and her new memoir, 'Driven'
  Claire Thompson Jul 19, 2018 0
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  Melissa Stephenson reads from Driven at Montgomery Distillery Tue., July 24, at 6 PM.

  Reading Melissa Stephenson’s memoir Driven: A White-Knuckled Ride to Heartbreak and Back is like listening to a cool older cousin recount her version of your family history. The Missoula-based author references her own adventures (hitchhiking in Alaska, walking the Appalachian Trail solo) almost as asides, letting them quietly illustrate her strength of character without overtaking the main focus: her relationship with her troubled older brother, Matthew, and what his suicide at 28 revealed about the loved ones he left behind.

  Driven began as a collection of short prose-poem pieces, now woven into a larger narrative structured around cars: from the Volkswagen Squarebacks of her earliest childhood memories, to the red ’79 Ford F-150 she inherited from Matthew after his death, to the Westfalia van in which she now takes her kids camping. The tight lens of those original scenes makes her story feel both vividly specific — capturing the dynamic of one family in one place and time — and universal.

  Every family has its special rituals, its particular tragedies, and Stephenson reflects our pain by revealing her own. The growing popularity of memoir as a genre could be linked to our efforts, as a culture, to encourage self-reflection and vulnerability for the sake of mental health — a practice not nearly as widespread when Matthew died in 2000.

  I talked with Stephenson about some of the themes driving her memoir.

  You write that your family “bootstrapped our way over the poverty line and into a facsimile of a middle-class lifestyle … Mom had a knack for creating the illusion that we had one hundred dollars for every dollar we spent.” Can you expand on that?

  Melissa Stephenson: Trying to write about our economic status seemed important, but really hard. Growing up in my hometown, my best friend lived in a trailer park. I felt like I was doing very well for Indiana at the time, to be living in an actual house. My mom was very strategic about making sure we had — even if it’s going on a credit card and she wasn’t telling us — at least a few pieces of name-brand clothing, and trying to facilitate sleepovers with doctors’ kids. She wanted to catapult us as much as she could into a higher social class than she felt she had ever been a part of.

  Yet striving to achieve all that for you and your brother left your mom alone in the end. She got what she wanted for her family, but what was left for her?

  MS: I remember being aware, growing up, like, why doesn’t she do anything for herself? What’s her thing? It’s all my ballet recital, and trying to get my brother to stick with a sport. And then once we were gone, she took it very personally. [She] threw everything into being a good mom; I don’t think she thought about her identity outside of that. When I think of my identity, I think of several other things before I think of mom.

  Melissa Stephenson
  Melissa Stephenson’s Driven offers a vivid story of family.

  photo by Amy Donovan
  You found a copy of The Redneck Manifesto among Matthew’s belongings after he died, a book that may have fueled his sense of victimhood, which you refer to as “the anger of a white boy who had been raised like a prince only to discover himself part toad and the story of his unlimited potential a hoax.” How has our current political climate affected your view of this part of his personality?

  MS: I’m sure that latching onto that book was like telling the pretty story of how the world doesn’t appreciate me. That’s a lot easier than looking within and trying to figure out how you’re responsible for how your life has turned out. Both depression and addiction make your brain a house of mirrors. If we had basic health care resources for mental health and addiction, how many people would have a chance to detox and have some basic tools for self-awareness? The era that we’re in now really feeds off people not getting health care. It’s to the benefit of the party in power to have a lot of sick and uneducated people to finger-point with them. I wonder if my brother would have fallen prey to some of that.

  It can sometimes be hard to recognize the line between moodiness and clinical depression, partying versus addiction. Looking back, do you see that line more clearly?

  MS: Part of why addiction is a family illness is because the whole family is kind of being gaslighted by the addict. The denial becomes a family thing. The sad thing is, near the end of my brother’s life, I didn’t expect to witness the kind of denial from my parents that I did. For an addict to be able to say: I think I need help, I am willing to go to rehab, is astonishing. I’m sure it was [my mom’s] own denial about her drinking [that led her to say to Matthew]: No, you’re a bad investment. We’re going to practice tough love.

  I wouldn’t be doing the work I’m doing if I wasn’t a big feelings person who’s prone to ups and downs. I have to be able to feel all those things in order to write stuff that makes other people feel something. But by the time I was in my mid-20s, it was clear, even though I’d had my ups and downs, that I was someone who could pay my bills and do the basics.

  I always pay attention. I have a lot of close friends who struggle with addiction. I try to check in with those people and at least be there if they’re ready for help. When you’re open and honest and vulnerable, it gives them permission to do that back.

  Your description of watching a woman work on her truck in the Ole’s parking lot on Orange — “she had something beyond wanderlust — a kind of confidence, persistence. She had grit” — captured something I think all of us afflicted with wanderlust strive for. Do you think you’ve achieved that kind of grit now?

  MS: I do. I think it was always there, but it took some trials for me to trust it. When I lost my brother, that was my worst fear. There is a resilience once you find out the thing that wrecked you didn’t break you, as cheesy as it might sound.

  I have made it a practice to learn how to do things. Volkswagen van culture is great for that. Every time I take the time to learn how to do something, it builds momentum. It’s a mix of taking the time to learn yourself, asking for help and then just taking a chance. What’s the worst that’s going to happen? You’re probably not going to break it more.

• Montana Public Radio - http://www.mtpr.org/post/melissa-stephensons-white-knuckled-ride-heartbreak-and-back

  Quoted in Sidelights: “From the moment [Matthew] died I knew there would be a book one day, if I could bring myself to do it, that would be about him and about me.” Stephenson told Sarah Aronson on Montana Public Radio’s The Write Question. “This book essentially. For years I couldn’t touch that material.” She could write a some vignettes, “but I couldn’t sit down and write a narrative about my brother’s death,” she continued. “That was overwhelming. It wasn’t really until I latched onto—I knew I needed a shaping device of some sort—and I thought if I can’t tell the whole story, and I’ve written 200 pages of these little memories, what could I write about? Oh, cars.”
  Melissa Stephenson's White-Knuckled Ride To Heartbreak And Back
  By SARAH ARONSON • JUN 14, 2018
  The Write Question
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  Listen Listening...28:58 Melissa Stephenson's White-Knuckled Ride to Heartbreak And Back

  From a lineage of secondhand family cars of the late ’60s, to the Honda that carried her from Montana to Texas as her new marriage disintegrated, to the ’70s Ford she drove away from her brother’s house after he took his life (leaving Melissa the truck, a dog, and a few mix tapes), to the VW van she now uses to take her kids camping, she knows these cars better than she knows some of the people closest to her. Driven away from grief, and toward hope, Melissa reckons with what it means to lose a beloved sibling.

  Driven will be released July 24th. Pre-order it here or from the retailer of your choice.

  Driven by Melissa Stephenson
  The following highlights are from a conversation with Melissa Stephenson about her book Driven: A White-Knuckled Ride to Heartbreak and Back. Click to listen now or subscribe to our podcast.

  Sarah Aronson: How are you most like your brother Matthew?

  Melissa Stephenson: Oh, I always think about how I’m so different than him. We’re both very empathetic. I think that’s something that runs from my father to my brother to me and to my son. We’re little empaths and we can kind of smell and absorb other people’s emotions.

  Matthew sounds like a character. The book is dedicated to him, and he committed suicide in 2000. As I was reading, it’s true, you spend much of the first part of the book explaining your differences. Why was this important to you to establish that from the get-go?

  Our differences?

  Yeah.

  I think growing up I had a basic insecurity and I looked to him as the kind of person I should be or wanted to be. He was a bright light and I was a little introvert, a little peculiar, and on the edges of things. So I really looked to him as a sign of who I wanted to be without realizing we all come into the world with different gifts, and maybe just owning what we’re given is the way we shine. But I didn’t get that when I was little.

  Sure. And you call yourself “petit tornado.” What did this look growing up?

  Much like my own daughter—that has come back to roost in my life, for sure. I was a big feelings kid and I was very driven. The things I wanted I wanted very intensely and I was a pot that boiled over regularly. Not so much with anger, but shame or hurt or upset, whatever it might be. I was a kid who had to vent her emotions and everyone would know how I was feeling in those big feeling moments.

  There were times and scenes when I felt almost protective of you as a child and in thinking about the craft of writing, how does a writer learn to write both honestly about themselves—particularly about their flaws—but without making themselves pitiful or repulsive to the reader?

  I think part of it is, as an older, more mature person, being able to look back at your younger self with both clarity and compassion. So for me to look back with the knowledge that I have now and be able to cast that on my former self and look at myself as a child much the way I look at one of my own children now, and to bring my compassion to it is key, and to have the wisdom of the adult narrator is key. But also just trying to stick to the facts, stick to the details. Put those experiences out there without judgement and then the reader is able to make their own decisions.

  What was the process of trusting your memory and also that you could write your way through this book, because it’s emotional. . .

  Yes. I’d say it took about three years for me to accept that I was writing a book and to have the confidence to think that I could write this book. From the moment he died I knew there would be a book one day, if I could bring myself to do it, that would be about him and about me. This book essentially. For years I couldn’t touch that material. And then I actually started writing this when I was working, ironically for Harcourt the publisher, for their textbook division, and things were slow. The economy was crashing in 2008, I believe, and we had all this time where we needed to look busy, so I started to write these little flash creative nonfiction pieces. I could write these tiny little memories—a lot of them have been absorbed in this final draft—but I couldn’t sit down and write a narrative about my brother’s death. That was overwhelming. It wasn’t really until I latched onto—I knew I needed a shaping device of some sort—and I thought if I can’t tell the whole story, and I’ve written 200 pages of these little memories, what could I write about? Oh, cars.

  What would you offer, in words or in sentiments, to those who’ve lost loved ones or friends to suicide?

  I read a passage in a book by Glennon Doyle recently called “Love Warrior,” and the little passage was “Grief is love’s souvenir.” I keep that in mind. Sometimes grief feels like a failure. Sometimes missing someone who on some level didn’t want to be here can feel like a failure. I’d back up and unpack that, and say people who kill themselves don’t necessarily not want to be here. And so to be kind to yourself, and to know that grief is the cost of love. And loving someone is never a failure.

  About the Book:

  A searing memoir about one woman’s road through heartbreak to hope following the death of her troubled brother, told through the series of cars that accompanied her.

  Growing up in a blue-collar family in the Midwest, Melissa Stephenson longed for escape. Her wanderlust was an innate reaction to the powerful personalities around her, and came too from her desire to find a place in the world where her artistic ambitions wouldn’t be thwarted. She found in automobiles the promise of a future beyond Indiana state lines.

  From a lineage of secondhand family cars of the late ’60s, to the Honda that carried her from Montana to Texas as her new marriage disintegrated, to the ’70s Ford she drove away from her brother’s house after he took his life (leaving Melissa the truck, a dog, and a few mix tapes), to the VW van she now uses to take her kids camping, she knows these cars better than she knows some of the people closest to her. Driven away from grief, and toward hope, Melissa reckons with what it means to lose a beloved sibling.

  Driven is a powerful story of healing, for all who have had to look back at pain to see how they can now move forward.

  Melissa Stephenson
  CREDIT ADRIANNE MATHIOWETZ
  About the Author:

  Melissa Stephenson earned her BA in English from the University of Montana and her MFA in fiction from Texas State University. Her writing has appeared in publications such as the Rumpus, the Washington Post, ZYZZYVA, and Fourth Genre. Driven is her first book. She lives in Missoula, Montana, with her two kids. Driven can be pre-ordered here.

• Public Libraries Online - http://publiclibrariesonline.org/2018/07/stephenson/

  Quoted in Sidelights: “Once I started to write about the cars instead of trying to write about the trauma or the loss directly, I found that it was a shaping device that could get me through the narrative. The harder parts of the story then would fall into place naturally without me trying to look them directly in the eye.”
  Melissa Stephenson
  Melissa Stephenson on the Daunting Task of Getting the Story Down
  by Brendan Dowling on July 26, 2018

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  Melissa Stephenson’s powerful memoir, Driven: A White-Knuckled Ride To Heartbreak and Back, traces her relationship with her beloved brother, who died by suicide, by cataloging the various cars from her life. With extreme compassion and biting humor, Stephenson recounts her various relationships with family members, as well as the wanderlust that launched her from her small hometown in Indiana. Booklist stated that “readers of grief memoirs will especially want to seek this out, but so should anyone looking for a story of finding strength in oneself” and Rick Bass said that “Driven does the hard and wonderful work of exhuming the beauty from which disconnection and heartbreak is woven.” Stephenson spoke with Brendan Dowling via telephone on July 10th.

  Your memoir is divided up into chapters loosely based around the car you were driving at the time. What made cars the perfect entry point to tell your and your brother’s story?

  It was practical more than anything. I had taken a long time to come back to writing after a five year break from it, and I think part of that was feeling overwhelmed by this story that had happened in my life. I was a poet and a fiction writer, but I felt like I kept trying to write around it. I couldn’t really write around it, but I also couldn’t write directly about it.

  For a couple of years I wrote all these flash memoir pieces that had to do with growing up in Indiana, but whenever I tried to write about the big event, or even my brother directly, I just drew a blank. The words just weren’t working. One day one of these short pieces I had been working with was about when we got our first, brand new, off-the-lot car, the Volare. As I was writing about that, the idea came to me to make a list of the cars we grew up with. Then I realized that the car story continued and was central to my brother’s death in inheriting one of his cars.

  Once I started to write about the cars instead of trying to write about the trauma or the loss directly, I found that it was a shaping device that could get me through the narrative. The harder parts of the story then would fall into place naturally without me trying to look them directly in the eye.

  It sounds like writing about the cars gave you permission to write about your brother?

  It’s not too far from the idea that Anne Lamott talks about in her craft book Bird by Bird. She talks about trying to stay really specific in using a one inch picture frame. Don’t look at the big picture. What can you really see through a one-inch picture frame? I feel like the cars gave me that sort of zoom-in focus that kept me from being overwhelmed by the weight and magnitude of the larger story. If I could follow one car at a time that was manageable, whereas before when I sat down to write about the big event it wasn’t.

  In writing this memoir, were there any memoirs you looked to for inspiration about how to tell your story?

  There were certain memoirs that I did not read as I was drafting mine because I was aware of them and I was afraid that there would be too many similarities. Actually I read a lot of fiction while I was writing the memoir, maybe to keep other writers’ voices out of my head.

  I’ve definitely been influenced by Mary Karr, especially Lit. Also The Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy and then the book by Anne Patchett, Truth and Beauty, which reflects on her friendship with Lucy Grealy. Then probably the most significant ones that I read, one before I started my memoir and one during, were Joan Didion’s two books, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights.

  I don’t think I’d encountered someone writing about grief like that. Reading The Year of Magical Thinking made me think, “Okay, maybe this is something that I could write about.” My fear was no one would be able to bear to read it, but I loved reading her book so that gave me the green light to try.

  While the book is very candid about all of the painful elements of your brother’s life, it’s also very funny. How did you find the balance the humor with some of the darker moments in the book?

  That makes me so happy, that’s the biggest compliment for you to say that. It definitely reflects the odd sense of humor that I grew up with in my family. I feel like a lot of that levity came with revision. It wasn’t something I was trying to force in there but once I had gotten down to the bare bones of some of the harder parts of the narrative I was a little desensitized to that myself and I was able to go in there and say, “Oh, there was this funny part and there’s this detail.” Actually my ex-husband was a great reader for me as far as just content and things that had happened. He was someone who’d also remind me little snippets, “Don’t you remember they played that terrible song at our wedding? You should put that in there!” So other people were able to help me see those moments as well.

  As I went back and did the daunting task of getting the basic story down, part of the fun was going back in and fully sketching out those moments. You can’t have the dark without the light. They’re always both in there. It makes me happy to hear that element came out.

  Throughout the book you have little paragraphs where you consider alternate timelines for you and your brother’s lives. Those parts are so poignant and moving. How did they find their way into your memoir?

  I did one writing residency, a fellowship in Vermont, and wrote half the manuscript on that fellowship. One day there we were having Open Studios where people go around and look at artists’ work, and I didn’t have anything to show. Just that day, for some reason, I’d written all those “consider this” snippets and cut them up in little pieces of paper and had them scattered out on my desk. I realized, “Oh well, I’ll leave these out at least.” I didn’t know what they’d do in the book or where they’d go. Through the revision process they got juggled up. There are a couple of elements in the book that came all at once like that and pretty much stayed that way within the book. But those kind of came in a day. It was a little mantra that came into my head while I was working. I’m a runner so things like that will come into my head while I’m running. I think that kind of bargaining or guessing is just part of grief.

  You interviewed a lot of your brother’s friends for the book. What was that research process like?

  A lot of them were a little hard to find. My brother died right before any of us had cell phones, probably a year before our pictures started to be digital. A lot of his friends were like him, very analog type of people. Once I’d found them all, whether phone or email, everyone was willing to help me. But I could tell some people had wanted to talk about it. They were very ready to share information. Everybody very willingly shared information, but some people I could tell it was still hard for them. I could also sense the trauma in the details they were giving me, that this is stuff they carry around and don’t talk about much. There’s one person who actually witnesses his death and is with him in when he dies, and that’s the person who did me an amazing favor of rehashing that experience for me and helping me get all the details right. I don’t think that’s something that that person talks about regularly at all.

  Your background is as a poet and as a fiction writer. What skills from those fields did you bring to writing your own story?

  I went to an arts s high school and studied writing there. I studied poetry the whole time. As I was leaving, I wrote my first creative non-fiction essay. My teacher, who was also a poet, slapped the last sentence and said, “See, now you know how to end something! That’s why you had to write all those poems!” I think what he was telling me was that when you know how to structure a poem and be very specific and bring readers to some sort of emotionally fulfilling ending, that’s great practice for prose as well. I feel like this thing that I got from studying fiction later in graduate school was just how to handle a narrative and make scenes. Those were things as a poet I didn’t really know how to do. They’re the parts of the book I enjoy the most, whether you’re in the middle of a wedding or someone trying to burn a tattoo off their leg, to be able to structure those scenes and handle dialogue and characters in a larger narrative.

  What role has the library played in your life?

  My brother and I grew up with teenage parents and we were not that well to do. Going to the library was at least a weekly event. My mother worked in our school libraries as well, so even though she didn’t go to college, even though we didn’t have much money, every week it was “Which books have you finished? Which books are you getting?” We had books all over the house. Some she would buy but most of them came from the library. In the piece that I wrote, it’s interesting looking back, my hometown has an odd history of mid century architecture that I didn’t realize was somewhat famous growing up. Our library has a giant famous sculpture in front. It was built in 1966 and has poured concrete honeycomb ceilings. It’s just an amazing building. I remember my brother and I going to storytime and when I visit there now, I still take my kids to that library. In Missoula we use our library constantly. That’s something I instill in my kids. We don’t need to own all these books, we can borrow these books and use these resources to explore.

Print Marked Items
Stephenson, Melissa: DRIVEN
Quoted in Sidelights: “raw, tender, and uniquely envisioned.”
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Stephenson, Melissa DRIVEN Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Adult Nonfiction) $23.00 7, 24 ISBN: 978-1-328-76829-2
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.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Stephenson, Melissa: DRIVEN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536571007/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8f37a90c. Accessed 19 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536571007
Quoted in Sidelights: “offers a rewarding twist on an American story, and is filled with love, grief, grit, and healing,”
Driven: The White-Knuckled Ride to Heartbreak and
Back
Publishers Weekly.
265.15 (Apr. 9, 2018): p66.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Driven: The White-Knuckled Ride to Heartbreak and Back
Melissa Stephenson. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $23 (256p) ISBN 978-1-328-76829-2
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 ... [was] 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 middleclass
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. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Driven: The White-Knuckled Ride to Heartbreak and Back." Publishers Weekly, 9 Apr. 2018, p. 66. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A535099994/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3c163c32. Accessed 19 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A535099994

"Stephenson, Melissa: DRIVEN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536571007/ITOF? u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 19 Aug. 2018. "Driven: The White-Knuckled Ride to Heartbreak and Back." Publishers Weekly, 9 Apr. 2018, p. 66. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A535099994/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 19 Aug. 2018.

• Missoulian
  https://missoulian.com/news/local/in-driven-a-missoula-author-revisits-personal-history-through-vehicles/article_cc8ce7a5-e684-593f-ac13-142ff036a960.html
  Word count: 839

  Quoted in Sidelights: “is an effective tactic,” remarked Chris La Tray in Montana’s Missoulian newspaper. “It makes the story so much more interesting than just another tell-all memoir about a person’s hardships. It is the kind of busted knuckle-geekiness obsession Stephenson brings to her story, with humor and all-too-familiar pathos over simple details of any given automobile, that makes this book something special.” He added that Stephenson “is a marvelous storyteller, with clean, simple prose that bears a surprising amount of emotional weight.”

  In 'Driven," a Missoula author revisits personal history through vehicles
  CHRIS LA TRAY for the Missoulian Jul 21, 2018
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  Missoula writer Melissa Stephenson opens her new book, “Driven: A White-Knuckled Ride to Heartbreak and Back,” her first, with a driving scene.

  It’s Texas, it’s August, and it is scorching hot outside. It’s also rush hour in an unfamiliar city. Stephenson is forced to retreat from the highway due to a malfunctioning horn in a pickup she has just inherited from her dead older brother; a brother only days gone, the young man having committed suicide.

  Unable to figure out what is happening under the hood of the pickup, Stephenson nearly has an emotional breakdown from the Texas-sized helping of stress she’s in the middle of. Who would blame her for doing so? And yet ... she lifts her head, gets back behind the wheel and pushes on. This scene, and the deft touch in which she shares it with us, captures perfectly the core of this book, and its beauty: the resiliency of Melissa Stephenson, her ability to take an emotional punch, and the voice with which she shares her story.

  The late poet Jim Harrison has been quoted as saying he remembers periods of his life based on the dogs he had at the time. Many of us can relate, even if, for some of us, it’s about the cars and trucks we drove, and the connections we had to the people in our lives we shared them with. That is the thread Stephenson uses to link the periods of her life with, the vehicles her family had when she was a child, and those she has had since.

  It is an effective tactic. It makes the story so much more interesting than just another tell-all memoir about a person’s hardships. It is the kind of busted knuckle-geekiness obsession Stephenson brings to her story, with humor and all-too-familiar pathos over simple details of any given automobile, that makes this book something special.

  It made me reflect on the vehicles that have been part of my life over the years, and the sorrows that accompany. Breakdowns — too many to count. Road trips with friends who are now gone. Driveway wrenching under the barely-patient direction of a dead father.

  One of my cherished possessions is the knob from the gear shift of my ’89 F-150, years gone now, that I zig-zagged across America in. It’s a talisman from a cherished vehicle, and yet, it isn’t really about the truck. I feel like I could slide onto the bench seat of some half-rusted old pickup with all my own swirling miasma of sorrow and neurosis, look Stephenson in the eye, and know she’d get it.

  There is a heap of sadness in this book, in Stephenson’s troubled relationship with her brother and his ultimate taking of his own life. We hear of her childhood, her time in a boarding school for children talented in the arts, and her passage through a marriage that ends with her the single mother of two children.

  I think what makes the emotional impact of the story Stephenson is telling between anecdotes about her vehicles is that she is able to use her relationship to cars to ground the story. It’s all more relatable, because most of us have had automobiles we’ve loved almost as much as people. We have taken solace in them, retreated to the road in them and tried to outrun our pain on open highways in them.

  The reason all this works is because Melissa Stephenson can flat-out write.

  She is a marvelous storyteller, with clean, simple prose that bears a surprising amount of emotional weight. Memoirs only work if the writer can make the reader care about their life — and that is far from automatic. Stephenson succeeds, and "Driven" is a debut to be proud of and a story, though often gut-wrenching, that many people will love.

  Chris La Tray is a freelance writer and photographer who lives in Missoula. His work has appeared in the Missoulian and Montana magazine. His short fiction has been published in various crime, noir, and pulp collections and anthologies. Read more of his work at chrislatray.com.

• Medium
  https://medium.com/@zachary_houle/a-review-of-melissa-stephensons-driven-4796fbae3095
  Word count: 1619

  Quoted in Sidelights: “Driven isn’t always a pleasant read, and its darkness is full of bumps in the road. However, as a redemption tale and reminder that all lives are worth living, this book offers a taste of the freedom one can get by taking a long, therapeutic road trip when a gap closes in on one’s life.”
  “This is a good, solid vehicle of a tale to get lost in, for all of the right or wrong reasons. Hop in and fasten your seatbelt; this is one hell of a ride.”

  A Review of Melissa Stephenson’s “Driven”
  Driven to Tears

  “Driven” Book Cover
  I’ve only owned one driveable car in my life: possibly a Tonka. It was a little race car I nicknamed the “88 car” because it had a gigantic 88 stickered on the side. It was my training wheels to a real bicycle, as it was something you could pedal, and I suppose it was a sort of consolation prize for me from my grandparents as I really wanted a Big Wheel after seeing kids driving those around in Toronto apartment building complex parking lots when I grew up in that city until I was three years old. When my parents and I moved from Toronto to the quiet Wilno, Ontario, where we lived in a rented red and white vinyl siding house, I got the car. I guess you could say it offered freedom for me, as much as I wanted something else instead, raring it down the porch and treating the steps leading to the street as an off ramp to the four-way highway-like freedom of the cul-de-sac where we lived. (Our house was at the very end of the street, not in the middle like in some Madness song.) One day, I became too big for the car — I could no longer fit — so it got handed down to my sister. The end. But I have some memories around that toy car, even if some of them aren’t very good — such as getting punished for throwing rocks at big kids muscling in on my turf at that dead end by coming by on their (gasp!) bicycles.

  Sure, I got to borrow my parent’s real car — an ’86 Oldsmobile Cutlass Sierra — when I got to being of age to drive, but I don’t think it wasn’t really the same thing as having a car of your own, toy or not. As Melissa Stephenson’s biography of her brother (that also works as a personal memoir) called Driven asserts, we are defined by the types of cars we drive and own and they serve as handy metaphors for the lives that we live. In Stephenson’s hands, it is a sad tale. Her blue-collar brother, Matthew, commits suicide at the age of 29 in Georgia — something we more or less know from the outset of the book, so that’s no spoiler — and was the proud owner of an original Ford F-150, a truck possibly bigger than the lives that would ultimately be attached to it. However, it was a vehicle that needed care, and, as this biography-memoir points out, it probably got more personal care from others when things broke down than its main owner ever did when confronted with problems of his own.

  Driven is a book that every person contemplating suicide or who is suffering from drug or alcohol abuse needs to read. It is ultimately about the damage that is caused when a person snuffs their life out on family and friends. Unsurprisingly, Melissa Stephenson had a lot of car trouble after her brother died, and Driven is a means of working through her emotions and fixing things to at least a repairable state in order to continue on with the task of living in the absence of others. Matthew seems to be an incomplete character — we know that he had troubles during his upbringing, but (in my only slight knock against this title) it’s hard to see why his almost Bob Stintson-like qualities as a boozer and trouble-maker (a character trait that almost killed him on more than one occasion) made him almost mythic in his family — but he’s a likable character, even if we all know the sad outcome. Driven is a call for help, not necessarily by the writer but a call to those who need help and are unsure or are too stubborn to get it themselves.

  Though 18 years have elapsed since Matthew died — time long enough to perhaps write about his life with some clarity and a measure of objectivity — you can tell from this book that his death is still very much fresh and raw for the author. That gives a pop and crackle to the prose of this memoir. As much as it is about living in the absence of a loved one, it is also — fittingly for a book that’s also about cars and trucks owned and used — a book about growing out of your isolating small town and finding out there might not be a place where you properly fit once you’re able to escape. That is the part of the book that perhaps most resonated with me, as I grew up in a couple of small towns before calling Ottawa, Ontario, my home — though not without a two-year pit stop back in Toronto where I have never felt more lost than I ever have been in my entire life. If anyone has gone to places where they’ve felt like a square peg, Driven will seem as though it was written specifically with you in mind.

  While Driven may be an odd memoir outside of the Christian self-help or devotional type of memoir in that it is about people who are just as ordinary as you and me (unless this genre is way more popular than I realize), it does offer a bit of celebrity “fly on the wall” style narrative. Matthew’s claim to fame, for instance, is that he was briefly the husband of the female bassist for alt-rockers Nashville Pussy, who had a level of notoriety around the turn of the millennium. Stephenson basically pulls every punch she has at her disposal against this celebrity, who seems to have had a part in leading Matthew down his road to self-ruin, so there’s a bit of a gossipy, tell-all tone to the work. It doesn’t get in the way of the story’s telling. Rather, it makes what already seems to be a pretty outlandish life lived (for instance, Matthew used to send his sister pictures of his feces at one point when they were separated as teenagers) even more reckless, and gives the memoir a shot of propulsion. Now, I don’t want to suggest that Matthew’s life was only worthy because he was married to a person for a short time who already had some level of fame, but it gives the story a shot of some level of rock ’n’ roll debauchery, and make the book unputdownable — despite the tragedy that this all happened to someone who really lived.

  In the end, Driven is a story about being in the passenger seat, being tethered to a life that is spinning out of control thanks to substance abuse and it is also a story about feeling utterly powerless in that role as a passenger at being able to step in and actually help. When the unthinkable actually becomes real, the book deals with the sense of guilt that permeates one’s life — the type of survivor’s guilt that can become toxic in a marriage, which happens here. The only thing offering a hint of salvation might be having a car that reminds you of that person, and is in need of the type of fixing from a broken horn problem (among others) that you can give to the vehicle that you couldn’t give to the person in question while they were still alive. Be sure: Driven isn’t always a pleasant read, and its darkness is full of bumps in the road. However, as a redemption tale and reminder that all lives are worth living, this book offers a taste of the freedom one can get by taking a long, therapeutic road trip when a gap closes in on one’s life. It doesn’t matter if you have a Porsche or a little Tonka car, Driven is a book about what drives us as human beings, and is a worthy reminder that even when we feel powerless over the life choices that others make, some kind of personal salvation is at hand for anyone and everyone who has survived. For that, Driven is a book that invites you to come along for the trip— for all its twists and curves, this is a good, solid vehicle of a tale to get lost in, for all of the right or wrong reasons. Hop in and fasten your seatbelt; this is one hell of a ride.

  Melissa Stephenson’s Driven: A White-Knuckled Ride to Heartbreak and Back was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on July 24, 2018.

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• Texas Observer
  https://www.texasobserver.org/driven-is-an-edgy-memoir-of-cars-crises-and-coming-of-age/
  Word count: 1033

  Quoted in Sidelights: “Driven is worth reading for a quality more difficult to portray in dust jacket copy: being in the hands of a real writer and watching the mastery of craft on the page as she condenses and expands the moments of ordinary life into story, casting for insight and meaning,”
  Specht reported. She added: “At times the vehicle motif strains. … Overall, however, the cars and trucks and vans that carry Stephenson through her coming-of-age serve the narrative in a number of ways, in addition to the wonderful automotive arcana.”

  Mary Helen Specht
  Published
  Mon, Jun 11, 2018
  at 2:59 pm CST
  ‘Driven’ is an Edgy Memoir of Cars, Crises and Coming of Age
  Melissa Stephenson’s new book exploits the bread and butter of memoir — parsing childhood experiences and complicated family dynamics — but also explores more experimental terrain.
  Stephenson's brother drove a 1979 Ford F-150.
  Stephenson's brother drove a 1979 Ford F-150. COURTESY/WIKIMEDIA
  In the crowded field of memoir, it’s the elevator pitch that sells copies, and this book certainly has one: a brother’s tragic suicide nestled within a narrative structured around the idiosyncratic vehicles the narrator drives on her journey through grief and self-discovery. But this memoir is neither lurid nor particularly sensational; its redemptive arc is muted, and there is nary a celebrity tidbit (though Lemmy Kilmister of Motörhead does make a brief appearance in epistolary form, something I never thought I’d write).

  Driven: A White-Knuckled Ride to Heartbreak and Back
  by Melissa Stephenson
  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  $23; 256 pages
  Instead, Melissa Stephenson’s Driven is worth reading for a quality more difficult to portray in dust jacket copy: being in the hands of a real writer and watching the mastery of craft on the page as she condenses and expands the moments of ordinary life into story, casting for insight and meaning. From the opening scene, where we are introduced to our narrator, “a hundred pound white girl with a ballerina’s neck and an arm full of tattoos,” as she drives her dead brother’s ’79 Ford F-150 with Confederate flag plates and a broken, continuously honking horn along I-35 in 110 degree heat, crossing “into the far right lane so I can pull over before I get my ass kicked,” it’s clear we’re in the hands of a professional.

  Stephenson, who earned her MFA at Texas State and explores her time living in San Marcos in the book, sets a scene so we feel like we’re inside her skin. “Perhaps because I was born in October,” she writes, “because I am part old lady, because I adore bitter beer and fine yarn, I feel most at home in the fall. … The trick is to lean into this ending, meet it with awe instead of fear, to accept that the cold and isolation of deep snow and small spaces waits around the bend.” With emotional restraint, she weaves physical and mental landscapes together until they become greater than their parts, like at the Athens, Georgia, trailer where her brother Matthew has just shot himself in the head with a Glock: “I can’t stop making a mental list of the sheriff’s words choices: Nice, clean, good, and done.”

  The narrative eschews strict chronology, but we never feel adrift, because the book follows the internal logic of a reminiscent narrator piecing together what may have propelled her and her brother toward such different fates. Stephenson exploits the bread and butter of memoir — parsing childhood experiences and complicated family dynamics — but Driven also explores edgier, more experimental terrain. Sections between chapters attempt to capture Matthew’s mindset on the day of his suicide. Later in the book, Stephenson intersperses italicized snippets of various alternate futures within the chapters (“Consider this: Your brother didn’t die, because you woke up in a hotel room in Colorado six days prior, drove cross-country in record time, and tethered him to the earth with your bone-thin arms.”). She captures all the ways the mind can’t help asking: what if?

  “On the road, I was no one’s daughter, no one’s student, no one’s little sister.”
  There are occasional missteps, mostly in tenor, such as a tendency to downplay privilege — yes, my parents bought me a car, but it was secondhand or, yes, I went to boarding school at Interlochen, but on scholarship. Stephenson also repeatedly emphasizes her desire to escape small-town Indiana, “something that held for me a potentially lethal dose of monotony,” as if this isn’t the longing of teenagers in small towns all over America.

  At times the vehicle motif strains (“…the beginning of a story about all the ways the wheels come off”). Overall, however, the cars and trucks and vans that carry Stephenson through her coming-of-age serve the narrative in a number of ways, in addition to the wonderful automotive arcana. They’re physical spaces for important events — the solidifying of her sibling relationship with Matthew as they play slugbug in the backseat during family vacations — and containers for difficult emotional realities: “I want the truck to feel like a sacred place where my brother’s ghost rides shotgun. It drives instead like a speeding corpse, a boat ride to Hades — the truck version of Stephen King’s Christine.” These vehicles also play a part in Stephenson’s move toward independence and self-reliance during her years in Texas: “On the road, I was no one’s daughter, no one’s student, no one’s little sister…”

  Though there’s an odd disconnect between how her brother is portrayed in scene (taciturn, difficult, sometimes even mean) and how Stephenson describes him (charming, magnetic and surrounded by friends), it’s clear that she is the Nick to his Gatsby. Until his death, “he played muse, bringing me stories from a world I could not inhabit, and I would write them.” Both the irony, and the beauty, of this book is that it isn’t so much a story about her brother at all. This story is hers.

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