Taking the Long Roadtrip Home

From a Tennessee farm to California’s Central Coast, the action-packed road trips of this panel navigate the complicated, winding paths of familial connection with heart, humor, and sincerity. Kevin Wilson’s Run for the Hills takes off with an unexpected road trip across America when Madeleine’s long-lost half brother asks her to leave home to join him on a crazy road trip to track down every single one of their half siblings. Irena Smith veers toward the West Coast in Troika: Three Generations, Three Days, and a Very American Road Trip, her lyrical memoir about a Gen X narrator’s three-day road trip with her mother and daughter, which traverses the landscapes of identity and family history and stretches from the horrors of the second world war and an escape from Soviet Russia to adolescence and motherhood in the suburbs of Silicon Valley. At times chaotic, at times tedious, and always eventful, the family road trips of this panel, moderated by award-winning Latinx writer Tomas Moniz, invite us to contemplate how we get from place to place, and what we carry with us along the way.