A mother and son embark on the road trip of a lifetime in a charming, poignant essay about making memories, facing fears, and donning fried-egg costumes by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Less. Andrew Sean Greer can’t wait to get home to San Francisco after a writer’s residency in Kansas. But when his mother, Sandra, decides to come along for the ride, he has a new get her to crack a smile at every stop, whether breathtaking or breathtakingly kitschy. He’s always known his mother to be as efficient and serious as a chemist (which she happens to be), always in gray, eyebrow cocked, and handling challenges with grace. To mix things up, Andrew develops an elaborate itinerary of planned chaos. Ahead, twenty-six hours of landmarks, pecan divinity, show tunes, and bizarre lodgings for the wild at heart. Best of all, mile by mile, mother and son realize how very much alike they are. And that this is just the escape they both needed.
Author
Andrew Sean Greer (born 1970) is an American novelist and short story writer. He is the bestselling author of The Story of a Marriage, which The New York Times has called an “inspired, lyrical novel,” and The Confessions of Max Tivoli, which was named one of the best books of 2004 by the San Francisco Chronicle and received a California Book Award. The child of two scientists, Greer studied writing with Robert Coover and Edmund White at Brown University, where he was the commencement speaker at his own graduation, where his unrehearsed remarks, critiquing Brown's admissions policies, caused a semi-riot. After years in New York working as a chauffeur, theater tech, television extra and unsuccessful writer, he moved to Missoula, Montana, where he received his Master of Fine Arts from The University of Montana, from where he soon moved to Seattle and two years later to San Francisco where he now lives. He is currently a fellow at the New York Public Library Cullman Center. He is an identical twin. While in San Francisco, he began to publish in magazines before releasing a collection of his stories, How It Was for Me. His stories have appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, The New Yorker and other national publications, and have been anthologized most recently in The Book of Other People, and The PEN/ O. Henry Prize Stories 2009. His first novel, The Path of Minor Planets, was published in 2001.
