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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
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Memoirs

MOTHERTRUCKER

Amy Butcher

MOTHERTRUCKER is chronicling the end of an abusive relationship in the wake of the 2016 election and the #MeToo movement, alongside a chance friendship and treacherous drive up an Alaskan highway with the late "Joy Mothertrucker," the nation's only female ice road trucker, who spent 13 years driving big rigs through the "the deadliest road in America".

Towards the end of a five-year-long abusive relationship, and in the wake of the 2016 election and the emergence of the #metoo movement, Amy Butcher stumbles upon the feed of Instagram celebrity "Joy Mothertrucker." Fifty-years-old with a husband, three children, and over eleven thousand followers, Joy is the nation's only female ice road trucker, a woman who has spent thirteen years driving big rigs through the heart of Alaskan wilderness on what has been called "the deadliest road in America." For Amy, Joy represents everything she wants to be - a woman, yes, but also brave and adventurous and strong. As 2017 drags on, as her boyfriend grows ever more volatile and the headlines ticking along the bottom of her television screen worsen, Amy finds herself obsessing over Joy's feed until, at last, angry and wounded and desperate, she calls Joy out-of-the-blue and asks to go for a ride. MOTHERTRUCKER is the story of that ride up the treacherous Dalton Highway - and also the stories behind it: an interrogation of contemporary feminism and female fear. Joy was killed in an accident on the Dalton Highway (the "Ice Road') late last year. Amy Butcher is an award-winning essayist and author of Visiting Hours (Blue Rider Press/Penguin Random House), a 2015 memoir that earned starred reviews and praise from The New York Times Sunday Review of Books, NPR, The Star Tribune, Kirkus Reviews, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, and others. Most recently, her essays have been featured on National Public Radio, the BBC, and The Guardian, anthologized in Best Travel Writing 2016, and awarded grand prize in the 2016 Solas Awards' "Best of Travel Writing" series and the 2014 Iowa Review Award as judged by David Shields. Additional essays have been awarded notable distinctions in the 2015, 2016, and 2017 editions of the Best American Essays series and have appeared in Granta, Harper's, The New York Times "Modern Love," The New York Times Sunday Review, Lit Hub, The Washington Post, The Iowa Review, The American Scholar, The Rumpus, The Paris Review online, Tin House online, and Brevity, among others. She earned her MFA from the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program and is the 2012-2013 recipient of Colgate University's Olive B. O'Connor Creative Writing fellowship in nonfiction. She is also the recent recipient of grants and awards from the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the Stanley Foundation for International Research, and Word Riot, Inc. She serves as an Assistant Professor of English at Ohio Wesleyan University and spends her summers teaching writing at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival and the award-winning Sitka Fine Arts Camp in Sitka, Alaska.

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Book Published 2021-11-01 by Little A

Comments

Mothertrucker is an unputdownable page-turner, the kind that asks you to listen more closely, behold each beauty, perceive every flicker of buoyancy or trepidation. This book is an adventure into the expanse of Alaska's wild, as luminous on the earthly plane as it is in the psyche - just as all good road trips are. Butcher's prose is a match struck in the dark. Readers will lean into each sling of the truck and know the cumbrous lurking of violence that shadows women into definition. Amy Butcher has crafted a tribute to a savior, and created one in its making. In short: I never wanted this book to end.

Like her subject, Joy 'Mothertrucker' Wiebe, Amy Butcher knows the power of women's words, and the power of women's friendships to disrupt and dismantle cycles of violence and despair. Mothertrucker is raw, beautiful, and at times terrifying - not unlike the Alaskan landscape its gifted author describes. But what it is more than anything else is hopeful. This book is a gift.

Mothertrucker is a gorgeously written and immersive memoir that I binged in a day. I love this book, this story, and Amy Butcher for taking me along for the ride.

Amy Butcher's Mothertrucker is both an intimate portrait of an unforgettable woman and a powerful exploration of how the author finds her way to a more courageous life. There's truth and beauty on every page of this gorgeous and gripping book.

I used to wonder what it would feel like to read a nonfictive piece of art that read like a literary novel, a mystery, a feature, the best of travel writing and welcoming theory. Now I know. A lot will be written about what Amy Butcher pulls off in this book. It's the how that is unsettling in the best way, the how that moves this book from remarkable to a gritty greatness we seldom experience in American literature.

An extraordinary story about the power and solace of female friendship. Butcher's journey into the Alaskan Arctic - a place of danger and beauty - illuminates the complex psychic landscape of two women navigating domestic abuse through a deft blending of place and identity. Fearless, raw, and gripping. Butcher has written a necessary and urgent book.

Rights to MOTHERTRUCKER have been optioned by Jill Soloway and Julianne Moore. Read more...

At once a gripping narrative, voyage of self-discovery, and manifesto of the power of female solidarity, Mothertruckermade me ache for all the women who have seen me, changed me, saved me. This book lights up the ways we as women lie to ourselves, even when we seem so strong, and recognizes that, more than any achievement or barrier broken, showing up for one another - being vulnerable with one another - will set us free.

This remarkable book is a polyphonic triumph of holy themes. It's a stunning tribute to the life of a brilliant soul. It's a social reckoning. It's a call to possibility. And it's a path to self-love. Healing is a journey, not a destination, and these pages allow us a passenger seat on Butcher's transformative ride of a lifetime.

UK: Two Roads

A beautifully written exploration of a woman's endeavor to let go of fear and open herself to joy. Can the divine be found on the most dangerous ice road in Alaska? Or is it through our own souls' journeys toward a most loving and merciful understanding of our own courage and pain? Or both and more? Amy Butcher takes us along for the ride with exquisite writing and heart-pounding yearning.

This book should be required reading. Amy Butcher writes a wholly immersive and heart-stopping meditation on love, God, and intimate violence; I wanted to reach back through generations and hand this book to every woman in my family. May we all take this transforming ride on the most dangerous highway in America and become changed. We will be better for it.

Amy Butcher's Mothertrucker is a riveting book, a dynamic portrait of an extraordinary woman - a long-haul trucker, a mother, a survivor - whose company carries us into even broader explorations of friendship, trauma, renewal, and the collision of many kinds of precarity: environmental, economic, and emotional. Butcher's voice is tender, curious, adamant, grateful, and always, always searching for a more complicated version of the truth.