From the Archive: The World Is on Fire

...And What Will You Do About It?

         

We’ve got a heap o’ new friends joining us—welcome, all! I’ll be posting some of the key pieces from the Going Solo archive so you can get up to speed. This here is the very first post: the inciting incident of the journey, and a few of the reasons it got underway. Feel free to share, restack, post, forward, do whatever you do, but more than anything just know we’re happy you’re here!

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This whole thing got started when I finally said Fuck it, bought a 16-foot fiberglass camper, abandoned my stuff—Craigslist furniture, three weddings' worth of china, 2000-odd books—in a rented house on a rundown farm, and set off, alone, on purpose, to watch the collapse of American life in real time.

            At the age of 48, I "rejected the narrative" and walked out on the life I had built and was raised to believe I should want. Not only did I realize I no longer believed in the endless pursuit of some phantasmal form of "success"—professional or personal, in love or at work, whether success meant a marriage that lasted a lifetime or consigned me to a purgatorial obedient plodding along some narrow pre-ordained career path that led straight to my grave—I also realized I no longer believed what I'd been told about how to be a woman. For good or ill, that year, I also realized I didn't care. That left me to make some choices, most of which I didn't even know I had.

            In choosing first a deliberately solo life, and then an entirely itinerant one, I am learning as I go to live the kind of life that I—and generations of people before me—have longed to live: one of solitude, autonomy, and freedom, a life driven not by obligation or expectation but by choice.  

            The journey was set motion by the sudden, seemingly harebrained idea of buying a camper, fueled by growing sense of power that comes with every new discovery—from changing a fuse to backing the damn Scamp up—and sustains its forward momentum as I make my way across the map, from small town to city, from a bar fight with a Nazi (I picked it) to the eerie peace of late evening wooded walks and the deepest sleep I've ever known. Foregrounding the still-rare experience of being a woman traveling alone—and in my case, traveling without destination—this ongoing project illuminates the way in which the idee fixe of gender cuts through the currents of American life like riptide, shaping and often warping every aspect of society and self.

            The journey underway is both geographic and political. My vantage point as a solo woman traveler puts me in uncannily—sometimes unsettlingly—close proximity to the real story, which is about the world through which I move. I set out in the summer of 2022 with the fall of Roe v. Wade; the first year of this newsletter, as well as the upcoming podcast and video channel, will bring us up to and beyond the 2024 presidential election in the United States. You'll come with me as I travel over, around, and through the myriad Americas that now exist in different geographical pockets around the country, into truck stops and diners and dive bars, into nightclubs and office buildings and ivory towers, into encounters—intimate, violent, tender, fraught—with people who are angry, oblivious, cruel, frightened, and kind. These encounters—which so often arise from questions of gender, place, and power—reveal not only the nation's fragmentation and its grief, but the delusional nature of its self-concept and its terrible truth.

            In this newsletter and the accompanying audio and video content available to paid subscribers, you'll find personal stories—mine and those of the people I interview—alongside deep reporting, sharply observed social commentary, cultural context and meticulously checked facts, history and poetics, philosophy and economics; more importantly, you'll witness the chaos, heartache, danger, and hope that characterize this volatile epoch in cultural time.

            Tapping into the energy behind the growing phenomenon of women going solo—both in their lives and on the road—the project serves as a firsthand report from the frontlines of this country's pitched internal battle over freedom, truth, and power. Along the way, I'll illuminate the pleasures of solitude and the ache of companionship, the power of self-reliance and the fragility of freedom, ask questions about bodily autonomy and manifest destiny, and explore the powerful, and powerfully creative, tension that exists between rootedness and the longing to run.

            We cannot disentangle ourselves or our lives from the seethe and surge of the world. The places in which our own stories are set, and cultural timelines our lifelines describe, will influence, sometimes overshadow, and always shape both the hero and the quest. This is a story about one woman's journey across a nation; it's also about the journey of a nation, and in many ways a world, that seem hellbent on reaching their own end. I'll write, riff, rant, and report about what I find on this quest—which is not for answers, but for better questions about what it means to be alive, to be in America and in the world at this moment in time, to remember and revise, to love and lose, to travel or stay put, to doubt or believe, to find certainty and have it shaken, to love one's country and, as James Baldwin wrote, to see that as the very reason one must retain and make good use of the right to criticize it perpetually. 

This newsletter, and the project as a whole, is an expression of ethics, aesthetics, and snark, of patriotism and protest; it is an active defense of the Fourth Estate and a utilization of the right to free speech, just as it is a critique of corporate journalism and the capitalist strategies of profiteering on works formerly known as art. To what end? That will depend. 

I'll go back to the words of James Agee, who, in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, articulated the moral question embedded in the entire premise of reporting, and clarified the need for reporting that acknowledges the power of subjective, personal engagement with the world, with this line: “Who are you who will read these words...and through what cause, by what chance, and for what purpose, and by what right do you qualify to, and what will you do about it?”