The Last True Love Story Author Brendan Kiely on His On the Road Research

I’ve always loved good road trip stories, but here’s the thing: I’ve always loved living them, too. Twenty years ago my high school buddy and I meandered over 5000 miles and 20 states looking for love and adventure; I explored Canada in the same little Chevy Reliant; not long after I took a Greyhound bus from Cincinnati to San Francisco and back; I made countless trips in myriad cars through the Midwest and the Northeast; and when I began The Last True Love Story I knew it was going to be an adventure from LA to upstate New York, and I knew I’d have to make at least part of the trip myself in order to write the book, because I didn’t have any idea what was going to happen between one end of the country and the other.
In the novel, Teddy, Corrina, and Gpa set out from Venice Beach, Los Angeles. So that’s where I started.

I knew my characters, I knew why they were racing out of town, but I didn’t know what they were going to find, or where. Maybe that was part of the adventure for me? I had to hit the road myself, in order to find the story?

The Last True Love Story is a dual love story: one of first love and one of trying to make love last forever. I knew I wanted the two stories to echo each other—for example, I knew I wanted the story of the grandparents’ first kiss to mirror the teens’ first kiss. The first would be in Ithaca, NY, but what about Corrina and Teddy’s? Where would that happen?

I drove from LA to Vegas on my own, and my buddy, Steve, picked me up in Vegas, and generously offered to drive from there. In the novel, Corrina and Teddy only have a few days to get across the country: Steve and I gave ourselves the same restriction. And just like Corrina and Teddy, we weren’t going to drive in a straight line. We were going to wander to look for a little magic.

Steve navigated us through Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. As we drove, the stories of Corrina, Teddy, and Gpa’s adventures seemed to rise up out of the land along the road.

Because I was on the road, and because this country is so wild and beautiful, the landscape became its own vivid character, too. Sometimes, I’d be stunned by mountain vistas or mesmerized by the desert wash around us, and sometimes it would feel like we were aiming to get lost in that elusive point where the road disappears right into the sky.

As Steve and I drifted through Texas, Oklahoma, and Missouri, I realized we were on our own American Odyssey, each day bringing a new adventure, meeting our own Cyclops, giants, and witches, traversing the land of the dead, strange island-like outposts, or even spying Helios’s cattle from a distance near Cadillac Ranch.

Everywhere we stopped—Flagstaff, Albuquerque, Tulsa; gas stations, parking lots, desolate bluffs—hummed with the invisible glow of Corrina and Teddy flirting, or Gpa telling a story about how he fell in love. In fact, I’m not sure who was following whom. Was I writing their story, or were Corrina and Teddy just a few miles up ahead, and was I only following their dust-wake across the country, recording their love story just as Teddy was trying to record every last entry of his grandparents’ love story in the Hendrix Family Book?
Maybe it was only on the road, in fact, that I could find the heart of the novel I was trying to write: the smallest, quietest corners of America, where Teddy, Corrina, and Gpa all learn more about romantic love, family love, and learning to love yourself and your dreams when you think no one else does. It was only on the road where I could learn how all three kinds of love stories could weave together into The Last True Love Story.