Greyhound: A Memoir

Combining history, reportage, and nature writing with intimate moments of reflection, Greyhound tells of the journey from miscarriage to parenthood, and the purpose creativity gives to our lives when we feel purposeless

In 2006, Joanna Pocock decided to travel from east to west across the US in a Greyhound bus as she mourned her miscarriages. Seventeen years later, at the start of 2023, and now in her midfifties, Pocock undertook the same journey again. 

Pocock follows in the wake of Simone de Beauvoir, Ethel Mannin, and Irma Kurtz, who all chronicled their travels across America. Exploring the intersection between capitalism and geography—urban, suburban and rural—and the impact of our relationship to the landscape, she zeroes in on the rivers of tarmac, the gas stations, the suburbs, and the sites of extraction created specifically for our twenty-first-century lifestyles, and their unintended environmental and social consequences. By revisiting the same cities, edgelands, roads, and motels in 2023 as she did in 2006, Pocock dissects the overlap between place and memory, between an earlier, more prosperous version of the United States and one mired in extreme poverty, drug addiction, and a larger division between the wealthy and the dispossessed.