Notes From The Road
Notes From The Road
A week before spring semester, a Philadelphia writing professor sets out for L.A. to deliver a friend’s car. His first night on the road, alone in a Super 8 motel, he makes three pro/con lists: one for staying in his job; one for staying in his relationship; and one for staying in Philadelphia. This book-length essay is a log of the author’s life on the road, peppered with reflections on his family, history, and life’s simple pleasures. In these pages, Ingram confronts the disappointments of middle-adulthood set against his Big Desires. “It was okay,” Ingram writes of a roadside meal he gets along the way, “in the way that about eighty-five percent of life is okay.”
A funny and tender rumination on indecision and an account of the places the mind wanders while driving in a straight line, Notes from the Road is a long essay that fits in your pocket for your next trip.
MIKE INGRAM’s stories and essays have appeared in publications including The North American Review, The Smart Set, EPOCH, and Medium’s Human Parts. He lives in Philadelphia, where he is an associate professor in the English department at Temple University, and co-host of the Book Fight podcast. He’s also a founding editor of Barrelhouse Magazine, and currently serves as its books editor.
“Notes from the Road is a book about hunger, about longing, about loss, but more than that, it is a book that speaks very eloquently to what it is to be American—which is to say: lonely—and the desire of so many to vanish, to disappear. A beautiful and moving work.”
—Amy Butcher, author of Mothertrucker
“I found Notes from the Road slyly intoxicating and utterly absorbing, these transcriptions from the emotional nerve endings of a guy who finds ‘about 85% of life is okay,’ but yearns for what might dwell on the other side of all that okay-ness. Whether he’s counting the days since his last cigarette, engaged in a ‘complicated relationship with the check engine light,’ or trying to figure out if a stranger’s nose stud is actually just a trick of the light, his voice is great company at every turn, full of wry, unassuming profundity, possessed of cadences utterly his own.”
—Leslie Jamison, author of Make It Scream, Make It Burn and The Empathy Exams
“In Mike Ingram’s hands, loneliness becomes extraordinary: the state of being fully present to one’s life in all of its randomness, absurdity, grace, menace, and potential. Notes from the Road gets under the skin through the most indirect and ingenious ways. I felt so lucky to be along for the ride.”
—Paul Lisicky, author of Later: My Life at the Edge of the World
“Compact and expansive, ruminative and funny, Notes from the Road moves like the best road trips, fast enough to thrill with stops so you can gawk. It’s a delightful, companionable, thought-provoking book.”
—Elizabeth McCracken, author of The Souvenir Museum and Bowlaway
“Mike Ingram’s entry into the Great American Road Trip Corpus tenderly debunks an idealized vision of America that seems to grow by the interstate like wildflowers. Along the way, Ingram revises his own story, listening to others and the voice inside his head. Notes from the Road may be a small book, but its big heart brings us in and wrestles with nostalgia, certainty, intimacy, and whatever passes for the American Dream these days. Buckle up and keep an eye on the check engine light: Ingram is the existential crisis tour guide we didn’t know we needed.”
—Daniel Nester, author of Shader and How To Be Inappropriate
“Mike Ingram makes for great company in Notes from the Road. Funny, erudite, and self-effacing, our affable narrator is gifted with a deep curiosity for the world around him. Like any good driver, he knows when to slow down, when to speed up, and when and where to stop. It’s a melancholy but ultimately hopeful story of one lone man on the road, a record of cross-country travel shot through with warmth, generosity, and radiance. I devoured the whole thing in one sitting—and can’t wait to go back.”
—Matthew Vollmer, author of Permanent Exhibit and This World Is Not Your Home