The Highway Kind

America, they say, is already dead and doesn’t know it. Whatever mystery or magic once haunted its blue highways and back roads has long since fled, and anyone lighting out for the territories in search of meaning and adventure will find only a grim, desiccated interior; a zombieland held together by cheap entertainment, political rancor, poisonous food, and despair.

Writers, too, have failed at their task. The complaint goes something like this: No longer channeling the spirit of the muddy river country that animated Twain, Melville, and Hemingway, our literati confine themselves to writing insular dispatches from cosmopolitan enclaves, in which a familiar set of themes—bad dates, grad school, Manhattan bohemia, going on your phone—are played in slightly different ways. It all has a feeling of enervating decadence: trifles, amusements, cultural exhaustion. Any vital voice in American letters, should it ever appear, wouldn’t find any purchase. And anyway, no one even reads.

Those are common views, and they’re not entirely baseless. It’s hard not to feel pessimistic if you look too long at the hollowed-out interior of the country and at the obscene divide between wealthy and wretched in the metropoles. And it’s hard to feel good about the state of the written word if you don’t venture beyond the New York Times bestseller list. But I know better. I haven’t yet written it all off as unsalvageable. I have hope for both the country and its literary output, in no small part because I read Meaghan Garvey.

Purely on the strength of her Substack newsletter, SCARY COOL SAD GOODBYE, Garvey has become one of my favorite working writers. The “vibes-based newsletter” constructs an invisible world, a shadow America that can be glimpsed out on the side streets and at the edges of the radio dial. Garvey writes lucid and precise essays on figures like Lucia Berlin, Harmony Korine, David Lynch, and Elvis and interviews characters who seem plucked from tall tales, like Raven Myers, the “trucker/photographer queen of the Southwest,” and “Titus Pullo,” the world’s leading expert on Chicagoland-area barbecue joints.

But the heart of the newsletter lies in dispatches from her adventures around the interior of the country. In her battleship of a ’93 DeVille, “blood-red on the outside, the dashboard, the leather seats,” she travels to various dive bars, supper clubs, honky-tonks, ghost towns, and nudist camps, and chronicles the environs and inhabitants in a charming and captivating voice: the voice of a friend. You could call it travel writing or journalism, but it’s something more than that. It feels like an attempt to map a vision of this country and its culture that acts as a small counter to the forces that conspire to cheapen and degrade everyday life. As Biz Sherbert once said about a Lana Del Rey concert, everyone’s looking for their own, better version of America.

Garvey began SCARY COOL SAD GOODBYE in 2020, after a long, grinding stint as a music and culture journalist in the heady days of Vice and Pitchfork. Its philosophy, she tells me over the phone, is to use her “intuition and good cheer” to “fling [herself] out into the Midwest and find the story, or the conversation, or the very interesting person, or the portal to another realm that happens to be in a dive bar.” That keen intuition has brought her to places like the Pinehurst Inn, a surreal spot in “Northern Michigan’s Lynchian underbelly” where the barflies brag that they’ve been to jail in 30 states and an Elvis impersonator called “Alvis” wails out the songs of the King in his sweat-soaked Vegas era, and to House on the Rock, an utterly bizarre wonderland of themed rooms deep in the Wisconsin woods, which Garvey describes as a “tweaked-out Graceland.” (Elvis, you may have noticed, inadvertently cameos in many of these posts. I tend to think of him as the guardian angel or spirit animal of SCARY COOL SAD GOODBYE, perhaps of America itself.)

By no means, however, is the purpose of the newsletter just to gawp at the strange goings-on in the heartland. Garvey has a real regard for these places and the people who inhabit them, and for a time when weirdos had more leeway to create their own odd, personal worlds. “I yearn for a more individualized time,” she tells me. “Not just with people but with places, where you could go to a city and not spin in a circle and be like, I could be in Nashville, Cleveland, San Francisco, I could be anywhere, and I wouldn’t know, because it’s all the same.” In my favorite of her essays, a long, sad, beautiful ramble around Texas in the footsteps of the great country singer Townes Van Zandt, she draws a pointed contrast between what remains of the Austin of the outlaw country era and the present-day “twisted yuppie shithole” that uses the great names of its past to furnish expensive cocktails and luxury high-rises. While chasing Townes’s ghost around this land of motels “‘groovy’ in that Austin way, retro but millennial in schemes of pink and orange” and dismal bars where “industrial chic meets urban cowboy,” she also runs into the wreckage of her own love life. Reading an essay about a country singer that suddenly swerves into ex-boyfriend talk is usually a signal to abort mission, but Garvey’s tone is perfect: wry, self-deprecating, and sweetly melancholic, in the tradition of her avowed model Eve Babitz.

I checked out of the motel and fired up the LoveMobile, checking the flyer for the church party, which began in 20 minutes. Inside the glove compartment my old cassettes remained, but for now I drove in silence. The morning’s incident had thrown me. In the dream Charlie recounted, I had been seduced by Townes, who’d then delivered him a song, completed but for the transcription. Townes himself insisted certain songs arrived in dreams, though not everything he said was exactly to be believed. Still, stranger things have happened. In any case, there went my love life, messing up my work again. Why’d Charlie have to go and make my Townes thing about him? Sobriety was my guess. Being freshly out of detox, as he’d been since New Year’s Day, can make a person grandiose.

Despite her penchant for midcentury nostalgia, Garvey avoids treating the places and people she writes about as fading relics of a brighter past. Her personal mythology includes Elvis and Marilyn but also Lana Del Rey and Vanderpump Rules; when she gives a list of summer reading recommendations, it includes Emma Cline and Pamela Anderson’s autobiography as well as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Charles Portis. The bars and tourist traps she visits might be pleasingly retro, but they’re still living parts of the landscape, with regulars and new customers and stories yet untold. More than most writers, she makes me feel as if what is most important to me in art and life has not been discarded by time, that I am continuing to participate in an active cultural tradition that corporations and algorithms, despite their best efforts, have not been able to entirely crush. “I like a place that’s been around for a hundred years,” she says, “because it flies in the face of doomers.”

Now, because I happen to love diners, road trips, dive bars, and torch songs, it’s quite natural for me to feel aesthetically aligned with Garvey. But my feelings toward her work go beyond shared sensibilities. I put her in a special category of writers who charge me up, who I reach for when I need to roll down life’s window and hit myself with a blast of bracing air. She reminds me not to get stuck in dull routine, that I control my own destiny, and can, if I so choose, hop in my car, hit the road, and spend a few days talking to strangers. She has crafted herself into the main character of her own ongoing American novel; a true capital-R Romantic, full of an unshakable belief in the essential beauty and possibility of the world. A minor set piece in her great obituary for Jimmy Buffett (which, by the way, completely changed my perspective on the man from Margaritaville) seems to me to exemplify this attitude:

evasion where the feds quit bothering with letters and simply help themselves to your savings account without so much as a how do you do, and a day at the beach with a paperback seemed like the only reasonable response [...] By sunset I’d read the thing cover to cover, breaking between stories to go for a swim or mix up a thermos of Diet Dark ‘n’ Stormy. Not only had Tales From Margaritaville swept me away from my problems and into a world of jasmine and plumeria, oysters and beer, pretty waitresses, limbo contests, and a drink called the Goombay Smash, I also was starting to get what made Jimmy Buffett tick.

Life might be an ongoing series of setbacks, bad beats, and humiliations, but it doesn’t necessarily preclude you from the small pleasures. And it’s those small pleasures—the decisions to chat up the waitress, to pull over at the weird roadside attraction, to ride your bike down to the shores of Lake Michigan and spend the day with a few drinks and a book—that add up to form a life well-lived.

Throughout our conversation, Garvey occasionally pauses to make asides to the effect of: I know things are often bad, I know America isn’t all sunshine and roses. I’m not saying things were better in 1956, or whatever. It’s a familiar disclaimer, one I’ve issued many times myself. Anyone interested in the mythopoetic aspects of America has to take pains to distance themselves from the poisonous nostalgia that characterizes so much of our political life. But lately I’ve had cause to think that rather than make a preemptive apology for all the evil and cruelty in the world, the best thing one can do to counter it is put forward a competing vision, like hers: an eerie and beautiful world of highways at night and lonesome train whistles and ghosts singing in the wires, of outlaws, eccentrics, and strangers who are, for the most part, good-natured. By sticking to this vision and refusing to take the world on the terms set by the forces of greed and darkness, Garvey has crafted a life worth reading about and developed an inimitable voice that makes her—hell, I’ll say it—one of America’s great contemporary writers. “You have to make the choice,” she tells me. “Not to be all, like, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, but to a large degree it’s a matter of temperament. Mystery and amusement and fascinating stories can be found just about anywhere, so long as you are looking.”