Greyhound: A Memoir

by Joanna Pocock

Overview

Longlisted for the NBCC Award for Criticism

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, in the wake of several miscarriages, Joanna Pocock traveled by Greyhound bus across the United States from Detroit to Los Angeles. Seventeen years later, she undertakes the same journey, revisiting the cities, edgelands, highways, and motels in the footsteps of the few women writers—Simone de Beauvoir, Ethel Mannin, and Irma Kurtz—who also chronicled their road trips across the United States. Combining memoir, reportage, environmental writing, and literary criticism, Greyhound is a moving and immersive book that captures an America in the throes of late capitalism with all its beauty, horror, and complexity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781593768010
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	08/12/2025
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

JOANNA POCOCK is an Irish Canadian writer living in London. Her writing has notably appeared in the Los Angeles Times and The Nation, and she is a contributor to the Dark Mountain Project. She won the 2018 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for Surrender, and in 2021 she was awarded the Arts Foundation’s Environmental Writing Award. She was short-listed for the Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Writer’s Award in 2023 for Greyhound.

Editorial Reviews

Longlisted for the NBCC Award for Criticism
Literary Hub, A Most Anticipated Book of the Year

"An engaging combination of the profound and the profane—much like the country Pocock traverses." —Bridget Bentz, NPR

"It is a testament to Pocock’s subtlety and skill that Greyhound can do so much without flashing neon signs over the various points it makes. Transitioning with deceptively light grace through its many significant subjects, the book flows like scenery past a windshield . . . Lyrical and clear-eyed at once, Pocock has reinvented the road-trip genre for a new age." —Melissa Holbrook Pierson, The Washington Post

"The Great American Road Trip, that idealized trek heading west, might be different now, according to author Pocock, who first made that journey in 2006 from Detroit to Los Angeles in the wake of grief after several miscarriages. In 2023, retracing her steps via Greyhound bus like French writer Simone de Beauvoir, she discovers fewer humans, more dirt and less safety—but the same magical 'sense of no longer existing.'" —Bethanne Patrick, Los Angeles Times

"Greyhound spins a memoir around [Pocock's] two epic journeys on America’s legendary buses, one done in 2006 and one in 2023. Her reflections on the changes between those two years are fascinating . . . I’ve done my time on those iconic buses too, so being lured down that rabbit-hole (or hound-hole) by Pocock was a great pleasure." —Sarah Bakewell, New Statesman

"This ambitious book asks important societal questions and is astute in its depictions of public living . . . Traversing urban metropolises and desert vistas, Greyhound is an erudite study of how living among others became a dying art." —Ellen Peirson-Hagger, The Observer

"Greyhound is a road trip like no other . . . Pocock’s rage is infectious and energising; her prose vivid. In unexpected places she finds kindness and generosity. There is both darkness and brilliance here: affection and laughter brighten the pages of this fierce, accusatory, tender and unforgettable book." —Lee Langley, The Spectator

"The book’s final, essential plea—to recognize what the Greyhound, for all these reasons, can uniquely offer—is ambitious and earnest. In this westward journey, Pocock seeks not fortune, success, or survival, but connection, in all senses of the word: for her own sake but also, more urgently, as a balm for America’s pervasive ills to which her bus ride grants her a front-row seat." —Maisie Hurwitz, Alta

"[An] increasingly essential writer . . . Pocock's method is that of the documentarian—she approaches her chosen subject with unblinking focus and a fierce, interrogative energy . . . Greyhound develops Pocock's voice in compelling fashion." —Gary Kaill, The London Magazine

"[Greyhound] uses its ecological consciousness to direct readers’ attentions to the natural world, thoughtfully probes the boundaries of its own awareness, and honestly struggles to achieve a comfortable sense of place . . . It ends with a pledge to continue cultivating a sense of belonging and a feeling that, for Joanna Pocock, 'home' may involve a set of ongoing practices rather than something she achieves once and for all." —Dan Kubis, Chicago Review of Books

"With clear eyes Pocock observes and reports from America’s interstitial spaces, its abandoned detours and dark medians, revealing a country of wild and violent edges that somehow still suffers beauty in its midst." —Jonny Diamond, Literary Hub

"[Pocock's] notes on the sad condition of American society are invaluable . . . This rare account of a woman traveling alone, and in some of the most desperate corners of the American landscape, is well worth reading. A pensive, clear-eyed vision of a collapsing world as seen through grimy, rain-streaked windows." —Kirkus Reviews

“Joanna Pocock’s Greyhound is an intimate epic, and a fierce mirror held to our U.S. ecological and sociological present such as only a visitor, seemingly, can provide. The thinking is scrupulous, the writing scraped and glinting and as stark as the landscape. This book kept me up all night and will stay with me.” —Jonathan Lethem

"Pocock reveals a complicated American landscape from the shabby seats of Greyhound buses and through a pinhole of grief as she retraces her past and a country’s past and finds suffering and redemption in both. She is at the mercy of the communities and the country she encounters, which, like the nation itself, is also in gripped in its own reckoning. Like Denis Johnson’s Angels and Jonathan Raban’s Bad Land, Greyhound finds truth and decency in the unglamourous and shows how the United States has perhaps always been on unstable soil." —Kerri Arsenault, author of Mill Town

"Greyhound is an instant classic, a chronicle of desperation, anger, and violence, as well as the luminous beauty and humanity that four decades of neoliberal looting have been unable to kill off from the American countryside. Pocock's eye is sharp and her prose crackles with wistfulness, fleeting camaraderie, and vitality. Not since William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways has a book so captured the feeling of the road." —Daegan Miller, author of This Radical Land

“Erudite, empathic and intensely engaging, Joanna Pocock rides the bus through our broken America with the eyes of a time traveler, on highways that are also paths through memory, skillfully intertwining narratives of her own journeys through different stages of life and others who have traced similar routes. Greyhound bears witness to how the damage we feel in our own lives and communities is rooted in our damaged relationship with the land on which we live, and in doing so provides a powerful prism through which to think about where we have been, where we are going, and other roads we could take.” —Christopher Brown, Philip K. Dick Award-nominated author of A Natural History of Empty Lots and Tropic of Kansas

“Pocock's writing is intellectually and emotionally thrilling. In Greyhound she brings us on a road trip through America's alienated hinterlands—anonymous motels, all-night diners, blighted backstreets—as she builds a kind of philosophy of transience. I'd follow her anywhere.” —Cal Flyn, author of Islands of Abandonment

“In Greyhound, Pocock takes us on an epic road trip through American landscapes, through urban dreams and nightmares. Along the way, she asks: how can our material comfort coexist with the impoverishment of nature? How much degradation do we have to witness before we change our way of living? With an exquisite and beautifully reflective prose, Pocock explores a heart of darkness, and expresses a deep desire and need to connect with the earth. It is a wonderful and vivid text from one of our most important ecofeminist writers.” —Xiaolu Guo, author of Call Me Ishmaelle

"Joanna Pocock's haunting, haunted journey across America's edgelands tells a troubled story of the country's journey to a more insular version of itself. Yet the dream of travel still holds, and the way we move can still move us. Her eye for the beauty of the gas station and the entrancing ennui of motel-land call to mind the photographs of Robert Adams and Blood in the Tracks-era Dylan. Most of all, she captures the camaraderie and transcendence of bus travel, where 'strangers are connected by the simple need to get somewhere.' Greyhound is as expansive as the landscape it travels through." —David Farrier, author of Nature's Genius

From the Publisher