Winner of the 2020 Indiana Emerging Author Award
“Lyrical and eloquent, Stephenson’s book is a journey of pain, beauty, and healing that also celebrates the life of her tragically misunderstood brother. Raw, tender, and uniquely envisioned.”
“Melissa Stephenson’s Driven does the hard and wonderful work of exhuming the beauty from which disconnection and heartbreak are woven. Perhaps no life, she reminds us, is ever yet fully lived; and there’s a beauty in that, too.”
“Not all writers are survivors and not all survivors are writers, but Melissa Stephenson is both and goddamn is she good. Driven is a book you will want to hold tight against your heart, to take with wherever you go. Piercing and beautiful.”
“Driven is written with a poet’s ear and a traveler’s grit, and it will be a comfort to anyone who has watched a loved one self-destruct, or struggled with the complicated identity of little sister. Melissa Stephenson shines a light on her brother’s dark path and ends up finding a road of her own.”
Driven
Growing up in a blue-collar family in the Midwest, Melissa Stephenson longed for escape. Her wanderlust was an innate reaction to the powerful personalities around her, and came too from her desire to find a place in the world where her artistic ambitions wouldn’t be thwarted. She found in automobiles the promise of a future beyond Indiana state lines.
From a lineage of secondhand family cars of the late ’60s, to the Honda that carried her from Montana to Texas as her new marriage disintegrated, to the ’70s Ford she drove away from her brother’s house after he took his life (leaving Melissa the truck, a dog, and a few mixed tapes), to the VW van she now uses to take her kids camping, she knows these cars better than she knows some of the people closest to her. Driven away from grief, and toward hope, Melissa reckons with what it means to lose a beloved sibling.
Driven is a powerful story of healing, for all who have had to look back at pain to see how they can now move forward.
“In a passionate memoir, Stephenson finds comfort and freedom in the cars that grounded the turbulence and restlessness of her life.”
“A rewarding twist on an American Story . . . filled with love, grief, grit, and healing.”
“Melissa Stephenson’s Driven is worth reading for a quality more difficult to portray in dust jacket copy: being in the hands of a real writer and watching the mastery of craft on the page as she condenses and expands the moments of ordinary life into story, casting for insight and meaning.”