Origin Story

This whole thing lurched to life when I got the harebrained idea to buy a teeny camper and live on the road full time—which I did, and I do. It wasn't and isn't "living the dream," and I didn't do it because #vanlife sounded neat. I'm a brassy old broad with work to do, not a sweet young thang with a trust fund and time to kill.

I hit the road because I had a hunch that there were people like me all over the country, all over the world, who'd spent a lifetime chasing, building, or working for some dream, and then woke up one day and realized that even if dreams came true—which in this country, this era, this economy, this world, is rare—they weren’t even sure what they were chasing was their own dream.

So - as the kids say - I “rejected the narrative” of American life, walked out on the life I had built and was raised to believe I should want, and gradually began to see that fairytale of marriage, family, domestic bliss, hearth, and home as not only phantasmal but fundamentally flawed. One Last Bitch comes out of my own failure to believe, or behave as if I believed, what I'd been told about how to be a woman—a good woman, the right kind of woman—and became instead the woman I am. In choosing first a deliberately solo life, and then an entirely itinerant one on the road, I am learning as I go how to live the kind of life that I, and many others, have longed to live: one of solitude, autonomy, and freedom, a life driven not by obligation or expectation but by choice.

Foregrounding the still-rare experience of being a woman traveling alone—and in my case, traveling without destination—One Last Bitch illuminates the way in which overt and covert battles for power, ownership, and control—over territory, property, bodies, and labor, over selfhood and identity and choice, over language and image, over truth, perception, and thought—cuts through the currents of American life like riptide, shaping and in some ways warping every aspect of society and self.