In 2006, in the wake of several miscarriages, Joanna Pocock travelled by Greyhound bus across the US from Detroit to Los Angeles. Seventeen years later, now in her 50s, she undertakes the same journey, revisiting the same cities, edgelands, highways and motels in the footsteps of the few women writers – Simone de Beauvoir, Ethel Mannin and Irma Kurtz – who chronicled their own road trips across the US. In Greyhound, Pocock explores the overlap of place and memory, the individual against the communal, and the privatization of public space as she navigates two very different landscapes – an earlier, less atomized America, and a current one mired in inequality, as it teeters on the brink of environmental catastrophe. Her focus is on the built-upon environment: the rivers of tarmac, the illuminated gas stations, the sprawling suburbs and the sites of extraction created specifically to fuel contemporary life. 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.
Greyhound
French paperback with flaps, 432 pages
Published 14 August 2025
Greyhound
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¶ Travelling on a Greyhound bus, you can disappear.
The day hadn’t yet begun as we pulled out of Detroit. We were heading to St. Louis through lashing rain under a black sky. The only sounds were the regular swish of windshield wipers and the rhythmic sucking of rubber tyres on wet tarmac. It was too early for conversation. The people around me seemed weary. Some looked like they hadn’t slept in days. Others had come prepared with pillows, eye masks and blankets. The woman next to me appeared lost in her thoughts. No phone, no book, she was just sitting. I could sense she was working something out in her mind. The reading lights didn’t work and I nodded off.
When I woke from a light sleep, I could just make out the skeletons of electricity pylons and the sprawling bodies of industrial buildings through the large foggy window. Every now and then the bright lights of gas stations and truck stops veered into view, signalling food, rest, a break from the grey monotony of the highway.
As I became more awake I noted fields, the outline of scrubby trees, ads for RV campgrounds, enormous parking lots, 18-wheelers, truck dealerships, farms, phone masts, a U-Haul storage centre with electric yellow windows lit from the inside, rusting CN boxcars, factories, the odd small opalescent body of water just about visible under the tungsten glow of the edgelands – a glow that dimmed with the brightening of the dawn. We passed a building whose chimney was on fire. No one seemed aware of it. The flames carried on burning in the muted landscape as we sped past.
It was March 2023 and I was on a Greyhound bus retracing a 2,300-mile journey from Detroit to Los Angeles – a trip I had taken in 2006. As a non-driver, my only options for crossing the continent solo consist of hitchhiking, taking a train, or a bus. For several years, I’d felt a pull to remake this journey, to revisit the motels, diners, highways, parking lots, towns, cities, suburbs and truck stops. I was curious to see how the places I had travelled through in 2006 had changed, while simultaneously catching a glimpse of the person I had been then. A ragged person running away from loss.
Marc Augé, the late French anthropologist, sees these revisited ‘places of memory’ as opportunities to face ‘the image of what we are no longer’. A place can offer a palimpsest of one’s past and present: the superimposition of our current selves onto the memories we have of a place allow us to be, in Augé’s words, ‘tourists of the private’.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, I tried to satisfy my urge to strike out across the United States by immersing myself in the literature of the Great American Road Trip. My journeying would be a literary one, as I followed fictional characters and writers into temporal and spatial zones forbidden to me.
I travelled with Sal Paradise, Jack Kerouac’s narrator in On the Road, in his search for the beating heart of the artist and visionary, for transcendence, for that sense of immensity and freedom that comes from racing across a continent chasing the unknown. And there was John Steinbeck, who in 1960, drove from Long Island to the Pacific coast and back again with his poodle and documented his 10,000-mile journey in Travels with Charley. In 1934, almost forty years before Steinbeck, the journalist and author James Rorty drove from Easton, Pennsylvania to Los Angeles, interviewing people along the way and describing their working conditions in fields and factories. Where Life Is Better: An Unsentimental American Journey is an extraordinary and angry work. ‘I encountered nothing,’ Rorty wrote,
in 15,000 miles of travel that disgusted and appalled me
so much as this American addiction to makebelieve.
Apparently, not even empty bellies can cure it. Of all the
facts I dug up, none seemed so significant or so dangerous as
the overwhelming fact of our lazy, irresponsible, adolescent
inability to face the truth or tell it.
The book that spoke to me the most was Blue Highways: A Journey into America by William Least Heat-Moon, a Missouri-born author of Irish, English and Osage ancestry. In 1978, Least Heat-Moon lost his job teaching English. On the day that he was fired, his wife, from whom he’d been separated for nine months, announced that she was now seeing ‘her “friend” Rick or Dick or Chick. Something like that.’ Least Heat-Moon decided to head off in his van across the US the very next day. ‘A man who couldn’t make things go right could at least go,’ he wrote. I knew this feeling well: a sense that fleeing was the best way to face change and loss.
Once the pandemic began to lift and my thoughts returned to the Greyhound, I wondered how I would feel sitting in the enclosed space of a bus. Would I be imagining the vectors of aerosols from my fellow passengers as they talked? Would I be envisioning traces of the virus on my armrest tracked in from a motel reception area? The innocent and unquestioned sharing of air with other people had become infected with fear. But my desire to revisit these places and a younger version of myself became too insistent to ignore.
I needed to know what it would be like as an older woman, a less vital and sexually adventurous one, a more circumspect one, to revisit my 2006 journey and re-engage with the world in our post-pandemic landscape. I wanted to see how I would respond to the sleeping head of a passenger as it tilted towards me on the bus, how I would react to the offer of sharing a pair of headphones or a bag of crisps. Would it be met with the Covid-infected knee-jerk ‘No, thanks’ of self-preservation and paranoia? Or the grace, humour and gratitude from the before times?
I would not only be revisiting the motels, cities, highways, parking lots, edgelands and upholstered seats of the Greyhound (that is, if they still existed) – I would also be revisiting my younger self. I would be trying to recapture Marc Augé’s ‘fugitive feelings … where all there is to do is “see what happens.”’ I put away my books and my fear and bought an airline ticket so I could make the journey that seventeen years earlier had emerged from a sense of profound grief.
(…)
‘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 Greyhound manages to be two things at once: a perfect American road trip story in the model of John Steinbeck and Simone de Beauvoir, and a brilliant critique of that most seductive and insidious of genres. In her hands, the American road is rendered in all its gorgeous complexity, a place of violence and inequality, as well as a route to liberation.’
— Madeleine Watts, author of Elegy, Southwest
‘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
‘Greyhound is a cool, generous book, an eyewitness account of the end of an empire. I liked crossing the USA in Pocock’s company – she is open in her encounters and thinks carefully about it all: appification, motel breakfasts, dawn over the mountains, the people who queue at the bus stop. The journey felt seamless and absorbing, like a long take.’
— Daisy Hildyard, author of Emergency
‘Joanna Pocock’s Greyhound is an intimate epic, and a fierce mirror held to the US 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, author of Brooklyn Crime Novel
‘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 gripped in its own reckoning. Like Denis Johnson’s Angels and Jonathan Raban’s Bad Land, Greyhound finds truth and decency in the unglamorous and shows how the United States has perhaps always been on unstable soil.’
— Kerri Arsenault, author of Mill Town
‘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
‘Erudite, empathic and intensely engaging, Joanna Pocock rides the bus through our broken America with the eyes of a time traveller, 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, author of A Natural History of Empty Lots
‘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, This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent
Praise for Surrender
‘Pocock’s prose is understated and spare, and, like a cave painting, does perfect justice to her subject…. This is nature writing that we need: standing in contrast to writing that forces the human into the picture as observer, or tries hard to pin the thing down exactly, with alienating expertise or florid description…. [Pocock’s] is a perspective not of objectivity or voyeurism, but of participation in the web of life and in the land and communities as she writes them.’
— Abi Andrews, Irish Times
‘This is a bewitching and deeply affecting book. Pocock’s elegant interweaving of the intimate and the expansive, the personal and the universal, culminates in a work that forces us to consider our own place in, and impact upon, a world that could itself have more past than future.’
— Tom Smalley, Spectator
‘Pocock is an environmentalist, yet she is also clearly a humanist. She is always willing to hear people out, no matter how extreme their points of view, and to accept the limits of her own knowledge…. [W]hether it is climate crisis or midlife crisis, Pocock holds her themes lightly, allowing the “fluidity of life” to run its course.’
— Clare Saxby, Times Literary Supplement
‘Written with great narrative richness and an anthropologist’s intrepid gaze, Surrender is fascinating, urgent and profoundly compelling. It is an important addition to nature’s library.’
— Chloe Aridjis, author of Sea Monsters
Joanna Pocock is an Irish-Canadian writer living in London. Her writing has notably appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation and Guardian US, and she is a contributing editor at 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 Fellowship. Greyhound is her second book.
