My great American roadtrip
My great American roadtrip
On solitude, Kerouac, The Artist's Way, and a new writing project that is definitely NOT Twilight fanfic
The book that first convinced me I wanted to be a writer was On The Road by Jack Kerouac. This is ridiculous for reasons I’ll soon get into.
I read it when I was 15. I was on a family beach trip and deeply distressed by the mundanity of my own life. I would retreat to the top bunk of the room I shared with my sister to scrawl inconsolably in my little brown notebook about how insipid and uninspired everyone around me was. (This was a marginal improvement from the dejected, cinematic pining I did after reading Twilight for the first time.)
On the Road takes place over a series of road trips across America. Its heroes (all men) were wild and reckless, burning the candle at both ends, dissatisfied with complacency. They beseeched 15-year-old me to abandon the polite luxury of her family’s rented beach house in the Outer Banks and take to the wide open road. I had never felt so seen.
This is objectively hilarious. Me, a sheltered Southern Baptist teenage girl, feeling as though no one had ever expressed her plight quite as precisely as these drunk, divorced, directionless, 1940s Beatnik poets. One of many brutal Goodreads reviews calls On the Road “a long dull boast about a series of road trips populated by vacuous largely despicable alcoholics with zero impulse control and an unshakeable belief that they are deeply profound observers of the human condition.”
…um—do I spot a new newsletter tagline? 💅💅💅
Despite these very fair shortcomings, On the Road short-circuited and rewired some core pathway in my adolescent brain. It solidified in me a mythological reverence for the transformative power of the Great American Road Trip. I marveled at how Kerouac could strike out across America, alone, without a plan, at ease in his ability to navigate the unknown and make meaning of it. (Also, worth reiterating: on a mind-boggling amount of substances.)
•••
I’ve always loved being alone. Alone was order and clarity. Being around other people was entropy and chaos. For whatever amount of time I spent with others, I would need a commensurate amount of time alone to recover. I felt like a sweater that had come unraveled; I required solitude to knit myself back together. In A Journal of a Solitude, May Sarton captures this feeling perfectly:
“I must not forget that, for me, being with people or even with one beloved person for any length of time without solitude is even worse. I lose my center. I feel dispersed, scattered, in pieces. I must have time alone in which to mull over my encounter, and to extract its juice, its essence, to understand what has really happened to me as a consequence of it.”
Time alone is necessary to make sense of the world, oneself, and one’s desires.
Despite this, I’d spent very little of my life alone. I’d never even lived by myself. I went from my childhood home to my college dorm and then straight into marriage.
By nature, solitude was rare in marriage. What I was looking for wasn’t an escape from my partner but a retreat into myself. Being in constant proximity with another person makes that difficult. It’s a lovely thing to be held in someone else’s thoughts, but it can also feel like a tether, like you can never quite leave their orbit. Even when I was alone, I never really felt alone. When we split, amidst the grief was also relief. I realized how exhausting it had been to constantly think about where I existed in space relative to someone else. For the first time, I felt the particular euphoria of not being observed.
I wasn’t sure what to do with my newfound freedom. Years without the time or space to truly retreat into myself had blunted my self-knowledge. I knew I’d had dreams before, but they’d gone hazy. What was it that I had wanted again? Not what my partner wanted or what I thought I was supposed to want, but what I actually wanted for myself. [Footage not found] I turned to The Artist’s Way to jog my memory.
•••
For years, people had told me of The Artist’s Way: “Until you need it, you won’t be ready for it. Then once you need it — and you’ll know when — it’s the only thing that will work.” Multiple people said this to me! Independently of one another! Spooky. I was 99% sure it was a cult. But then I finally needed it, and I realized they had all been right.
If On the Road was the book that first convinced me I wanted to be a writer, then The Artist’s Way was the book that convinced me the second time.
The Artist’s Way is framed as a spiritual path to higher creativity, but it’s really a recovery manual for one’s identity. Solitude, through the core practices of Morning Pages and Artist Dates, is the first and most important tool in this work:
As we lose our vagueness about our self, our values, our life situation, we become available to the moment. It is there, in the particular, that we contact the creative self. Until we experience the freedom of solitude, we cannot connect authentically. We may be enmeshed, but we are not encountered. Art lies in the moment of encounter: we meet our truth and we meet ourselves.
Solitude allows us to replace vagueness with specifics. It takes the shaky borders of our self and defines them. Then it expands them.
The Artist’s Way helped me get clear on what I wanted and what I was afraid to let myself want. One exercise, literally called Buried Dreams, has you make several lists, including: List five things you used to enjoy doing. List five things you would personally never do that sound fun. List five things you would like to try once. If you had five other lives to live, what would you do with them?
This sounds cheesy when you hear it. But when you’re actually doing it, it doesn’t feel cheesy. It feels terrifying. It took me months to work up enough courage to admit I wanted to be a published author. Once you start writing this stuff down, day after day, it becomes nearly impossible not to take action on it.
I started the program for the first time in September 2021, and I can trace a direct line from that book to everything that’s happened since. A “stronger and clearer me” emerged. I made little changes at first. I began weightlifting and took a drawing class. I took bigger leaps. I quit drinking, moved out of my house, lived abroad, and traveled full-time. I started writing again after an almost 7-year hiatus, which was the biggest breakthrough of all.
I guess that’s why all those evangelists (suspected cult members) warned me that I had to be ready. True solitude and the self-awareness that comes with it will change your life — whether you want it to or not.
•••
Even though I had imprinted on On the Road (that’s another Twilight reference, btw) at such an early age, I’d never considered doing my own solo road trip across America until I read The Artist’s Way.
Then, it only seemed like a matter of when.
As I write this, I’ve just returned from my summer road trip across the United States, exactly 16 years after that initial reading of On the Road. My version of the Great American Roadtrip had significantly fewer drugs, crime, and illicit affairs than Kerouac’s (though still non-zero!) but just as much breathless awe.
Mostly, though, there was the solitude. I’d never experienced anything like it. I wasn’t just by myself. I was alone in a Wild West, Oregon trail, horse-and-buggy, cowboy-cigarette-commercial way that felt quintessentially American.
There were full days or weekends when no one knew where I was. I hiked to the Delicate Arch in Moab and to Crater Lake in Oregon, alone. I stayed at nice hotels in Missouri and questionable ones in Montana, alone. I stole large quantities of snacks from their breakfast buffets using a complex system of Tupperware containers. I prayed my tenuous system of knots would keep my bike attached to my car at 90mph. I drove through the desert and mountains and salt flats at golden hour with the windows down, partially for the vibes but mostly because my AC only intermittently worked.
I asked no one’s permission. I gave no status reports (though my mom would call bi-weekly demanding my location so she could “know which direction to worry.”) I could feel my body physically relax into the solitude like I was paying back stores from which I’d borrowed over the years. I was unmonitored, unobserved, and I loved it.
•••
In Portland, I went to a concert alone for the first time. I’d gotten day-of tickets to see Samia as that week’s Artist Date. On the way there, I passed a sign at a bus stop warning that you could die of loneliness, which felt pointed.
My secret shame up until then was that I’d never really enjoyed live shows despite loving music and being married to a musician. I was always too self-conscious at shows to enjoy them. I’d go with a partner or a friend and spend most of the time wondering if they were enjoying it, what to do with my hands, or whether I looked weird while dancing (the answer is almost always yes). Everything except actually experiencing the music.
I got to the Wonder Ballroom and squeezed in right up front. The college-aged boys next to me were already headbanging to the saddest ballads you’ve ever heard. The anonymity of being alone in a crowd was a different version of solitude, but it gave me the same feeling of being able to forget myself. When Samia started on the opening chords of “Big Wheel,” I surprised myself by bursting into tears.
That song had been an anthem during the hardest moments of the past few years. When I heard it, it brought me back to those initial days of living alone, waking up surprised by it, with only myself to rely on — and the realization, over time, that that was enough. Does it get any better than crying triumphant, un-self-conscious tears while dancing alone (together) in a dark, crowded room? This was my first time and it was a 10/10 experience.
•••
One of the biggest gifts The Artist’s Way gave me was permission to take myself seriously as a writer again. Of all the dreams I dusted off, that was the one I was happiest to be reunited with.
I assumed this trip out west would give me a burst of creative inspiration. After all, On the Road was famously typed on a continuous 120-foot reel of paper over three weeks (“AND IT SHOWS” is the unanimous verdict of the Goodreads mob).
Kerouac certainly didn’t let travel slow down his writing output, which is more than I can say for myself. I’d imagined myself in the Pacific Northwest or in Lake Tahoe, with a cat in my lap and feet warmed by the grate, writing my own great American novel. Or, at the very least, a slightly more regular edition of this newsletter.
This did not come to pass, at least not at first. Travel was restorative, but it was also exhausting. All that time on the road gave me the space for the emotional processing I’d deferred over the past couple of years. That basically took the entire summer.
Finally, in Seattle, my last stop before heading back east, something shifted. After a summer of solitude, my mind felt clear for the first time in ages. When I sat down to write again, the words came easily. Soon I had 30,000 of them and — it seemed — the start of a book*. It was another one of those dreams that I’d put away on a shelf and assumed I’d left behind. Another one that I felt scared to say out loud until the prospect of never saying it out loud became even scarier.
* Note: Despite ample evidence to the contrary, this book is not, in fact, Twilight fanfic.
This summer’s long stretch of solitude was exactly what I needed. But as Rilke says in Letters to a Young Poet, “The art of creating is nothing without the vast ongoing participation and collaboration of the real world.” I’ve finally made it back to Nashville and I’ll be pausing here for a bit to re-engage with the real world, my beloved Nashville community, and all the inspiration that brings.
Even Kerouac went home eventually:
“The bus roared on. I was going home in October. Everybody goes home in October.”
Love,
Lane 💋
Little obsessions
Keeping this section short and sweet, as I am (allegedly) participating in National Novel Writing Month and should be preserving my word count for that. 😅
📚 Reading: My current fiction selection is The Story of a New Name, the second book in Elena Ferrante’s Neopolitan novels, after devouring My Brilliant Friend. For nonfiction, I’m reading Melissa Febos’s Body Work: The Power of Personal Narrative, whose defense of memoir makes hitting send on this newsletter possible:
“Navel-gazing is not for the faint of heart. The risk of honest self-appraisal requires bravery. To place our flawed selves in the context of this magnificent, broken world is the opposite of narcissism, which is building a self-image that pleases you.”
✈️ Traveling: I took my sister, Libby, to NYC for our babymoon. (No, her husband wasn’t invited.) We spent a rainy Saturday at Sleep No More, a non-linear interactive film-noir Macbeth performance set in a 1930s hotel. I loved it. As for my sister, you’ll have to ask her how she felt about being forced to wear a beaked mask, sprint up and down five flights of stairs, and get splattered by fake blood during a sacrificial ritual scene while seven months pregnant. 😇 Of course, we watched the corresponding Broad City episode in our hotel room afterward.
🎧 Listening: A new playlist for a new season. 🍁🍂 Send me your suggestions!
My fave❤️