Mothertrucker: Finding Joy on the Loneliest Road in America
The true story of two women who found meaning, strength, and friendship in one of the most punishing and magnificent landscapes on earth.
Amy Butcher was an accomplished college professor, mentor, and writer, but in her own home, she was embarrassed and emotionally burdened by an increasingly abusive relationship. Exhausted and terrified of the ways her partner's behavior could escalate, Amy reached out to Instagram celebrity Joy "Mothertrucker" Wiebe. Joy was a fifty-year-old wife and mother and the nation's only female ice road trucker, a woman who maneuvered big rigs through the Alaskan wilderness along the deadliest road in America. Joy was everything Amy wanted to be: independent, fearless, and in charge of her life in a landscape dominated by men. Invited by Joy to ride shotgun, Amy found her escape on a road that was treacherous, beautiful, and exhilarating--an adventurous ride through the Alaskan wilderness that was profoundly life changing.
Mothertrucker is the story of that bracing four-hundred-mile journey navigating snow-glazed overpasses, ice-blue curves, and near plummets. It's also the stories that led them both to Alaska--an interrogation of the reality of female fear, domestic violence, and how to overcome--and an exploration into just how galvanizing friendships between women can be.
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Amy Butcher is the author of Visiting Hours and an essayist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Granta, Harper's, The Iowa Review, Lit Hub, Guernica, Brevity, and others. Excerpts of Mothertrucker, which is currently being developed into a major motion picture, earned a 2020 Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, and Amy's additional work has benefited from awards and grants from the Vermont Studio Center, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the Stanley Awards for International Research, and the Olive B. O'Connor Fellowship in Creative Writing from Colgate University. She earned her MFA from the University of Iowa and presently serves as the director of creative writing and an associate professor of English at Ohio Wesleyan University. Amy teaches annually at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival and the Sitka Fine Arts Camp in Sitka, Alaska, and she lives in Ohio with her three rescue dogs, beautiful beasts. For more information visit www.amyebutcher.com.
"A sobering reflection on verbal and psychological abuse, Butcher's book honors the healing power of female friendship and questions the nature of divinity beyond its constricting patriarchal manifestations. A searching and deeply empathetic memoir." --Kirkus Reviews
"In this tender and gripping tale, essayist Butcher (Visiting Hours) recounts her unlikely adventure through Alaska with the country's only female ice trucker, the late Joy "Mothertrucker" Wiebe...Along the way, Butcher explores myriad issues with nuance and grace, including Indigenous rights, violence against women, religious hypocrisy, and environmental concerns. It's a trip readers won't soon forget." --Publishers Weekly
"[Butcher] brings the details to vivid life as she describes both the brutally beautiful landscape and the many people she and Joy met on their brief journey together. A moving account of the impact of connection between women." --Booklist
"It's through the context of Butcher's and Wiebe's shared experiences--and their attempts at sharing what they've gone through with each other--that Alaska truly enters the fabric of the text...This works well. The way Alaska (and land, in general) is often portrayed in books is as a feminine force: a place that offers refuge, that provides, and that consoles...This book is the journey of Butcher's seeing Alaska as she is journeying to revise her imaginings of people--real, imperfect, frustrating, beautiful." --Daily Sitka Sentinel
"Butcher's Mothertrucker takes a nuanced look at the stories of women--specifically her's and Wieibe's--to understand the complexities of relationships with intimate partner violence." --Chicago Review of Books
"A tribute to the power of female friendship to get us through anything, including domestic abuse, Mothertrucker is a compelling story of a professor, Amy, who seeks out an Instagram celebrity ice driver, and rides shotgun on an unforgettable, 400-mile trip through Alaska." --Good Morning America
"Ms. Butcher finds a way to make her story as much about the crisscross knot that is America today as it is about her and Joy, their short time together, and those men whom women love and too often fear...it is shot through with poignant insights about that extraordinary place and the extraordinary woman who drew her there. By listening so well to that landscape and to her plucky companion, Ms. Butcher indeed finds untapped reserves of self-reliance, and finally the power to reinvent herself. She also tells a rattling good story." --The Wall Street Journal
"[A] master class in the power of brutally honest writing." --Washington Independent Review of Books
"No one can argue that she is not an honest and brave writer. She also is adept at blending and finding correlations in her story and that of Joy. Butcher's prose is clear, well-composed and often appealingly humorous, especially when describing her adventures on the road with Joy." --The Columbus Dispatch
"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." --Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams and The Recovering
"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." --T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls
"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." --Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild
"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." --Alissa Nutting, author of Tampa and Made for Love
"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." --Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy and Long Division
"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." --Joey Soloway, creator of Transparent and I Love Dick
"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." --Chelsea Bieker, author of Godshot
"At once a gripping narrative, voyage of self-discovery, and manifesto of the power of female solidarity, Mothertrucker made 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." --Sarah Menkedick, author of Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America
"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." --Jen Percy, New York Times contributing writer and author of Demon Camp
"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." --Cameron Dezen Hammon, author of This Is My Body
"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." --Mary Miller, author of Biloxi
