In short
Meaghan Garvey’s memoir/road book Midwestern Death Trip, mixing personal reflection, Midwest history, and bar-based dispatches to argue that the region’s “boring” surface hides wonder, lore, and complexity. She frames the project as a post-COVID reset: leaving the internet, getting a driver’s license late, and driving to find “inns” (taverns) and “lore” (ghost stories, crime history, local myth).
Guest background
Meaghan Garvey is a writer, music critic, journalist, illustrator, and artist. She runs a Substack for years and has worked in music journalism; her editor pushed her to write a book.
Key claims
“Memoir” is a first-person route to universal truths; the Midwest is often misdefined as rural; outsider perspective matters; politics is present as a “flicker” at the margins but people are more nuanced than voting stereotypes; modern culture’s doom narrative is wrong—America is “beautiful and crazy.”
Notable examples
“Seaweed Charlie” (a Chicago North Shore ghost likely tied to Lieutenant Laverne F. Neighbors, WWII pilot); Wisconsin Death Trip as a title/reference; Dollar General as homogenization; supper clubs as preserved third spaces threatened mainly by generational turnover; Cairo, Illinois/Mound City encounter with an electrician innkeeper who showed antisemitic conspiracy material and a Hitler-loving manifesto.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOExploring 'Midwestern Death Trip'
0:45 to 5:00
Meaghan discusses her book, 'Midwestern Death Trip', and its themes.
“It's like, oh my God, hi, I'm 39 and here's my memoir.”
Reading from the Book
5:00 to 10:00
Meaghan reads an excerpt from 'Midwestern Death Trip' that captures its essence.
“that section made me think of that old George Carlin sketch where he's like nobody has good names anymore like what happened to all the good names like Johnny and Joey and Buddy and Fred he's like now it's all like Chad.”
Research and Process Behind the Book
10:00 to 12:30
Discussion on Meaghan's research methods and creative process for writing the book.
“I live in Philadelphia and that like Like technically parts of, or I don't know if it's technically, but parts of Pennsylvania are people call the Midwest, like the other side of the state, which is weird.”
Defining the Midwest
12:30 to 14:00
Meaghan and hosts discuss the complexities of defining the Midwest and its culture.
“And I think I can commiserate with people that live there on a different level, maybe because of specifically where we're meeting, which is like usually bars.”
Post-COVID Reflections and Book Origins
14:00 to 18:01
Explore how post-COVID restlessness inspired a book about the Midwest.
“and just done all of this shit for my own enchantment and amusement.”
Mythology and the Midwest
18:01 to 20:54
Discuss the lack of artistic representations of the Midwest and personal motivations.
“And had you already been doing these road trips when he approached you about this?”
Repression and American Culture
20:54 to 23:12
Examine how repression in Midwestern culture shapes perspectives on American identity.
“When you sort of deposit yourself or like fling yourself into some place that you've never been to and don't know anyone there, I look for the inns.”
Finding Unique Places in the Midwest
23:12 to 26:53
Discuss the search for distinctive locations and personal experiences in the Midwest.
“In other ways, it had to be the Midwest because though it is perhaps the most misunderstood region of America, I think that's because it presents as so conservative on the surface, or at least that's the stereotype.”
Intuition in Exploration
26:53 to 28:00
Explore the role of intuition in discovering interesting places while traveling.
“We were in coastal Connecticut, but we found, it was through word of mouth that we found our Megan places.”
Exploring Local Culture and Intuition in Travel
28:00 to 31:28
Discover how intuition and local culture shape travel experiences.
“So it's like if something's been around for 100 years, I'm going to fucking go there.”
Show all 25 chapters
Preservation of Local Spots Amidst Change
31:28 to 35:15
Learn about the preservation of local culture and the challenges it faces.
“sprawl erasure homogenization that we were talking about that you see a lot of other places.”
Concerns Over Future of Cultural Spaces
35:15 to 39:50
Examine concerns about the future of local cultural spaces as demographics shift.
“in spite of it all, in spite of the content flattening and superficial accessibility that's now been spurred by social media and all that?”
Nuance in Political Perceptions Across America
39:50 to 42:01
Explore the complexity of people's political views beyond stereotypes.
“You know, so I don't know if I have the answer of like, what are the coastal elite libs missing in like understanding the heart of America.”
Exploring Lindy West's 'Adult Braces'
42:01 to 43:15
A discussion on Lindy West's controversial book and the societal perceptions it challenges.
“And this people were talking about this because she was in this like polyamorous, horrible love triangle.”
The Complexity of Political Engagement
43:16 to 44:19
Examining the challenges of political dialogue and coalition building in a polarized society.
A Haunting Experience in Cairo, Illinois
44:20 to 46:56
A recount of a creepy stay in a ghost town and a disturbing encounter with a conspiracy theorist.
“I thought it would be kind of interesting to see.”
Finding Beauty in Chaos
46:57 to 49:18
A reflection on the beauty and craziness of America amidst its challenges.
“But then I'm always falling for the people I find in the dark corners of the Midwest, a whole universe of strangers beneath what presents as a region of small-town familiarity.”
Literary Influences and Storytelling
49:19 to 52:07
Discussing literary influences and the storytelling tradition in contemporary literature.
“It's crumbling and bad, but like it's beautiful and it's crazy.”
The Reality of the Writer's Journey
52:08 to 55:40
Exploring the sacrifices and realities faced by writers on the road.
“And I was so jealous because I love Salem.”
Struggling with Vanity and Aging
56:00 to 58:20
The discussion delves into the feelings of vanity and aging that surface post-book completion.
“So there was like this weird surge of vanity where I almost couldn't like focus on the book that I'd written because I was like, you better start working out.”
The Role of Women in Journalism
58:20 to 1:00:40
Exploring the perceived expiration of relevance in female journalists as they age.
“And they've got this physical discipline and they've been a good sport, like being a good loser.”
The Search for Meaning in the Midwest
1:00:40 to 1:03:40
A reflection on what the journey through the Midwest reveals about life and personal history.
“Do you feel like ultimately this exercise was finding something or escaping something or a little bit of both?”
Lessons from Wisconsin Death Trip
1:03:40 to 1:06:40
Discussion on the unsettling yet comforting realizations derived from historical parallels.
“Is there a kind of comfort maybe in realizing that maybe it's always been this way, you know, and what can we learn from that?”
Beauty and Wonder Manifesto
1:06:40 to 1:07:40
The manifesto highlights finding beauty and meaning in mundane experiences and locations.
Book Promotion and Future Projects
1:07:40 to 1:10:00
Meaghan discusses her book's success and hints at future writing directions.
“I mean, dropping out is such an American tradition anyway, right?”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:07Hey guys, it's Andrea Dominick and Emily Friedlander, and you're listening to Cujo, a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. And today our guest is Meaghan Garvey. She is a writer, music critic, journalist, illustrator, artist of all trades. and specifically we're here today to talk about her excellent new, I guess you'd call it a memoir, your new book. It's called Midwestern Death Trip. How would you describe it, Megan? You know, I always get tripped up. I think they say memoir because, well, I don't know why they say memoir. I guess just because it's nonfiction, but I always get tripped up at that term because it feels so like douchey almost.
0:49It's like, oh my God, hi, I'm 39 and here's my memoir. you know but i feel like i feel like i'm harnessing the first person perspective to get to some more like universal truths if you will yeah well we wanted to start we'll get we'll get more into what it is because it does include reflections on your own life also about a road trip and more than that on spiritual and literal levels but let's kick things off first with we'd love for you to read a selection from the book if you could set that up and let us know what we're getting into totally so i'm gonna read just a little bit from a chapter called seaweed charlie and though it is a road trip book this is the chapter that is set in the neighborhood where i live which is rogers park in chicago and it takes place during 2020 but it's not really about all that shit it's about um when your boyfriend dumps you as soon as he gets out of prison and then you gotta buy a bunch of speed on the dark web about it okay so this is the beginning of seaweed charlie All the guys at the lighthouse were tired of hearing me go on about seaweed Charlie, but that was just too bad for them.
1:53Side note, the lighthouse is my neighborhood bar. I'd been asking everyone if they had seen him around lately, but as usual, nobody had, and I started to gather that certain regulars had questions regarding my soundness of mind. Well, perhaps I was losing the plot just a touch, habitually popping the truck driver drugs I'd ordered in bulk on the dark web, but that was nobody's business. And besides, a modern woman has the right to remain vigilant, I muttered to nobody as I marched down to the bar. In any case, the love of my life had rather quickly changed its tune upon completion of his eight-year stay in federal prison.
2:27And now here I was, tweaking on Malaysian speed and wandering the North Shore, looking for a goddamn ghost. It had been one of those nights when I discovered Seaweed Charlie, the kind where it's 4 a.m. and you're on 400 milligrams of the pills that fighter pilots favored in the second Gulf War. and a couple dozen browser tabs deep in your local haunted lore. This particular night's rabbit hole pertained to the cemetery down the street from where I lived, on the north end of Chicago, abutting the lakeshore. Within Calvary Cemetery's 92 acres of lakefront burial grounds lie more than 219 ,000 interments since 1859.
3:02I walked through it from time to time, examining the headstones. Doomtastic clemat, said one I saw the other day, etched onto a tombstone carved to look like a tree trunk, though silent he speaks. There's a four-lane road that separates the cemetery from the lake shore, which I've nearly died while trying to cross at least 25 times. Back in the 1950s, a handful of motorists came to notice something strange out in the water as they passed. A lanky, drowning figure, maybe 40 yards out, only he wasn't drowning. They'd watch the man, tall, rail-thin, dripping with algae, slowly climb the breakwater and heave himself across the street to Calvary, then disappear.
3:38In the decades to follow, there would be several dozen instances, always after dark, of drivers swerving to avoid the gaunt and soggy man staggering across the road in tattered service clothes. Now and then a jogger would come upon a trail of seaweed streaking from the lakefront to the cemetery's gate. On Friday, May 4th, 1951, the front page of the Chicago Tribune read, 100C Jet Hit Late, Pilot Still Missing. The aircraft was a single-seat McDonnell FH Phantom. I love how I include that part as if I know anything about like jet planes. The pilot was Lieutenant Laverne F. Neighbors, a 30-year-old World War II veteran and instructor at the Glenview Naval Air Station, seven miles north of the cemetery.
4:17Students at the nearby university watched the jet plane hit the water some 200 yards from shore. And as it sank, they watched the distant pilot climb aboard the wing, signaling for help that never came. The plane's wreckage washed up near the cemetery a few days later. Lieutenant Laverne F. Neighbors did not. Chicago ghost hunters agree that the North Shore's famous specter is most likely Lieutenant Neighbors, known to some cloak-wheely as the Aviator. But as for me, I prefer his other nickname, Seaweed Charlie. A guy with a name like that would fit right in with all my bar friends. Scotty Motown, Johnny Super 8, Fat Gay Jack, Hillbilly Carl.
4:52I pictured him at the lighthouse dripping algae on the carpet. PBR tallboy, vice grips, in his bloodless, clammy hand. I'll call it there. So great. So evocative. that section made me think of that old George Carlin sketch where he's like nobody has good names anymore like what happened to all the good names like Johnny and Joey and Buddy and Fred he's like now it's all like Chad. Totally they should make the modern one where everyone's called like Bailey and Kaylee.
5:22Meaghan Garvey:Yeah exactly. I know we're gonna get into this in the conversation like your process for the book but was it a lot of Google tabs like all this history that you bring in these obscure little stories from the past? Did you go to a lot of libraries? Were you just like Googling up a storm? I was Googling up a storm and not for that story, but a lot of like old folkloric books from 100 or 150 years ago from sort of like amateur academics of the Midwest. And that was the best part because I feel like when you're doing the research, you can like insulate yourself from like, you can kick the can down the road of writing.
6:00You're like, I'm safe here. I'm safe here in this research for the next like 16 hours. Yeah. Talk a little bit about the book from which your book takes its title and that the book opens with. Your book is Midwestern Death Trip. The reference book is Wisconsin Death Trip. Yeah. So Wisconsin Death Trip is something that is, I guess you could call it a cult classic, but I don't know how well known it is these days. But in the 70s, it was kind of like a countercultural classic. But it was written by a guy called Michael Lacey or rather like I don't even know if I would say written. It was compiled by Michael Lacey, who is a grad student at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in the early 70s.
6:41He was really bored. So he spent a lot of time in like the Wisconsin Historical Society going through old like just weird old shit in there. And he came upon this trove of photos from the late 1800s, early 1900s, taken by the town photographer in this small town in Wisconsin called Black River Falls. And that doesn't sound terribly interesting, but the way these photos looked was there was something so haunting about them. It was like these people in this like modest, like dirt farm town at the turn of the 20th century. Like it was almost like this lynchian vortex of like horror and drama and like psychedelic mystery, just like written on their faces in the way that you can like look around post-COVID and see like just like crisis written on everybody's face.
7:28And so he started going through the newspaper at that time and found more evidence of this like bizarre, like vortex of drama and weirdness where like women are like slashing their throats with sheep shears or like throwing themselves into wells and people are killing their entire families. And like arson is basically a competitive sport and religious mania is huge. That was that was a big one. so he put the this these images and texts together in such a way that just sort of created this like countercultural coffee table book that was very odd and compelling and I sort of got into it because I fancied myself a goth so I was like like so dark and and as I've kind of softened with age maybe the appeal that I took from it was more of like this idea that even the most modest lives are so interesting and I think that was especially relevant to my sort of like ongoing mission to like find enchantment in what some would say is the most boring region of the country.
8:29Yeah so in a way it's almost this like sadistic optimism of like it's always crazy no matter where you are.
8:36Meaghan Garvey:Could you sort of tell us a little bit about like just the frame of the book or like when you say it's about this region like which region you mean yeah so this book is a monument to my project of kind of finding wonder and intrigue and amusement and beauty in the midwest which you would think i would have a better idea or a definition of what exactly the midwest is having like dedicated the past decade of my life to it but i feel like no one can still define what the midwest exactly is and it's so funny because like I hear all the time like I was listening to this podcast kind of like a coastal elite podcast and uh they were interviewing a musician from Maine and they they described him as midwestern I was like this is this is the farthest corner of the northeast that you can get and it's I was reading a story about Ethel Kane where they called her midwestern I was like well she is from Florida so close so I feel like sometimes there's this like kind of confusion or almost the way people use Midwestern is almost to say like rural or flyover when like just by definition is not true.
9:46So much of it is urban. So I think it's interesting to me to try and be as specific as I can of like what people talk about when they talk about the Midwest and how that differs from like my experience of it.
10:00Meaghan Garvey:Totally. I live in Philadelphia and that like Like technically parts of, or I don't know if it's technically, but parts of Pennsylvania are people call the Midwest, like the other side of the state, which is weird. But Philadelphia is totally coastal, Northeast or like mid-Atlantic culture. Totally. Yeah. And definitely we can get to this a little bit later, but we're in this moment with, you know, recent elections, for example, and people are like, what? They elected like a socialist candidate in these Midwestern towns? You also see that in Florida. which was like also crazy yeah and you're kind of like well if you're surprised by that you probably don't understand these places very much you know oh yeah yeah i mean when i say that like there's this confusion of like midwestern and rural like oftentimes people like don't even think about chicago as like definitionally midwestern but it's like we have a democratic socialist male he doesn't do jack shit but but we got it and you talk a little bit about where you live but you're also going into these places around the Midwest where you're almost considered an outsider sometimes, right?
11:10Oh, yeah. And I mean, what I realized after I wrote the book, I was kind of like, shit, what's this about? I realized it was at its core was sort of like moving through the world as a stranger. And I want to emphasize that because like, I certainly don't want for the book to be interpreted as me trying to be like the Midwestern whisperer or to be like the voice of this region that is so disparate geographically, culturally, politically, industrially. Like I don't wish to speak for it because I can't. So that part of like being a stranger, being an outsider was important for me personally, because I find a lot of inspiration in that.
11:54Like it's funny because like if you read this book, you would think I had like no living family and no friends, which like, just to be clear, I have friends. But yeah, but also like the political part. There's this kind of like skirting with politics that I also wanted to be kind of careful in the book, not to like romanticize or valorize anything, but just to like meet people in places where they are. But I think that the outsider-ness is central to that. Because yeah, I don't want to be like, I speak for like post-industrial, like upper Michigan, because I don't. But I'm drawn to it. And I think I can commiserate with people that live there on a different level, maybe because of specifically where we're meeting, which is like usually bars.
12:42The Culture Journalist is an independent project that relies on word of mouth and is funded entirely by listeners. If this pod had something meaningful to your life and you want to access everything we put out, please consider supporting our work by becoming a paid subscriber over at our Substack. Paid subscribers receive access to our Discord community, the Cujoplex, full access to bonus episodes, and more goodies. You can get it all for just five bucks a month over at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Midwestern Death Trip is part memoir, part history, part kind of road book, you know, part dispatch from places that a lot of the national media generally encounters only as kind of a political abstraction.
13:26At the same time, you yourself admit in the book that you were basically driving to these far flung places in the Midwest and going on what you called weeklong benders. So it's very yes and it's like all of these things. And talk a little bit about how the idea for the book took shape. I mean, it's kind of weird. I'm having a reckoning with this right now because it's that whole like do what you love thing. And like, I feel like as people who have like worked in music media, we all know how that works out. It's just like there's a lot of like disenchantment that can come from it. But I probably would have never written this book and just done all of this shit for my own enchantment and amusement.
14:08Unless my editor had like very sternly sat me down and been like, please write a book like you got to do this. But the premise of it came from a sort of like post-COVID restlessness. And I mentioned this in the intro, I think, but I kind of thought that like after COVID, there would be this renewal of like awe. And like, oh, my gosh, like this is where we live and we can go outside and we can do all this shit. But it was, as we know, sort of the opposite where there was just like a doubling down on like misanthropy and paranoia. And isolation. And isolation. And I didn't have a driver's license until I was in my mid 30s because I just never really had to.
14:52And I don't know, I'm kind of a bum, but. Same TBH. Yeah. So but after COVID, I don't know, I was feeling so like Lana Del Rey ride video, you know, I just got to get up there on the open road. So I finally got myself a driver's license and I wasn't like, you know, jaded yet by the idea of like being in the car. So it was like such a joy to like just just ride. And so, yeah, that's where it stems from. And I didn't really know if or how it would coalesce into a narrative. And I didn't know how much how comfortable I would be like fashioning myself as like this main character. It's so embarrassing.
15:33and I'm still trying to like grapple with the shame of that in certain ways but yeah that's how it came together it was just like I just wanted to get in the car and fucking drive and
15:42Meaghan Garvey:like stay off the internet wait so you had an editor who was like keep doing this this is a book is that what happened quite literally I went to some like fancy party in New York and he sat me down and was like I want you to write a book this is going to be the title I'm like okay sick that title's cool and he's like and in this book I want you to figure out like what the fuck is your problem I'm like roger that that's amazing because I was almost like this book I was like reading it I'm like this is almost like so good that I am surprised it got published does that make sense or like I can't imagine I mean you have like you are a respected writer your name does speak for itself but I was also like I can totally imagine an agent like if you took this to an agent than being like no it has to be more blah blah blah or it has to be like it can't it's too obscure it's too niche or but like the fact that it is niche is why it is so good oh my god thanks yeah but i know what you mean like if i if i gave this to an agent they would be like what is this there's like seven things going on and like who the fuck are you yeah and who's the audience yeah it's like you know why are people going to read about this or how many people live in the area that you're writing about and are they going to read the like just shit like that no totally yeah totally but I realized that like and I didn't intend to do this but in a way like I fucking hate that I'm playing into this but like it happened accidentally but there are so few works of art about the Midwest I realized afterwards like name the like when I name like the great Wisconsin movie it's it's kind of hard to come up with or like you know Thomas Pynchon wrote about Milwaukee in his latest book but like what's the great and they're great Midwestern authors, but like there aren't a lot of like works of art specifically set in our catering to the Midwest, strangely enough.
17:32So kind of when you drop the name, people that live in the Midwest feel like seen and heard or whatever, and they'll just like respond to it automatically. So in a way, that was kind of like helpful for me.
17:42Meaghan Garvey:Was the editor from the Midwest or more like curious about it? No, he's not from the Midwest. He's a New Yorker. But I think he had a prurient interest in the third part of his proposal of like figure out what is wrong with you more so than he was interested in the Midwestern part. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah. And had you already been doing these road trips when he approached you about this? Yeah. So I've been doing this sub stack for six years now. I'm only realizing right now how much of an impact COVID had on me because this was my little COVID project as well. like I thought that my career in music journalism was over and I was sort of right about that but um I was like well shit it was kind of like like okay I'll like start a sub stack like fucking everybody else and it'll just be like my literally us yeah this podcast is was our little COVID project totally and I was like this is like this is like my last tether to this world and I'll like kind of like sharpen my tools and like keep myself occupied and give my life a structure and inevitably that won't work out and I'll just bartend and waitress for the rest of my life you know but it actually sort of like stoked or maybe like helps materialize for the first time my like real interest in writing that was not like I don't know I took music journalism seriously but it's it's hard to like have that just like light your fire after a while you know yeah I never thought it would happen but it's like I mean I still love music journalism and I still do some stuff in music.
19:15Meaghan Garvey:But I remember when I was in journalism school, having this teacher who was like, I started off as a music journalist. And then I started working for Mother Jones. And I was like, why would you leave music journalism? And now I, you know, 10 years later, I understand. I know. And it's a me problem, too. I mean, well, it's partially a me problem. But then the other problem is, you know, everything else. A little this, a little that, for sure. So when you started writing the book or while you were at least trying to maybe untie the knot of this proposal that your editor had given you was your intention to kind of document a region maybe craft a mythology around it or maybe was it to try to upend an existing mythology about the midwest I think it was a bit more selfish in a way I think it was my selfish mission to try and enchant my own life as best I could it was like a mid-30s reckoning in a sense of all life that was spent largely on the internet in my 20s which seemed really cool and worthwhile at the time and then I feel like I I woke up in my early 30s and was like holy shit man like I hate the the cliche touch grass but it was like what have you been doing like real yeah there's this country that you live in that you've barely explored because you've been reading blogs you know that's insane and part part of that was like the diminished internet landscape too but yeah it was kind of like a reckoning with how i lived my life and i wanted to like drastically change that and so i think the the mythology the midwestern mythology was was a byproduct of like me doing a hard reset of my life say more about that um When you sort of deposit yourself or like fling yourself into some place that you've never been to and don't know anyone there, I look for the inns.
21:12And on one hand, the inn is like the local tavern. And on the other hand, the inn is the lore. and that could either be like the local gossip or the ghost stories and you know the the history of like crime or like the history of like a fallen industry i guess i talk all the time about like feeling disenchanted with life and if you get into carl yume he says that like myth is um a way for like humans to find meaning in a increasingly meaningless seeming world and I started being like well what are our modern myths some they're so like psychotic you know they're like they're all politically tinged and like conspiracy theories and stuff so maybe I was looking for a mythology that felt less like psycho and divisive and I found that in like stuff like Paul Bunyan and shit, you know, like there's there's this lumberjack that came out of the upper Midwest that now we write like children's stories about.
22:19And it was nice to like reframe and like grasp at like mythology that didn't seem so like sick and twisted.
22:27Meaghan Garvey:Yeah, like a question that we thought about in preparing for this conversation is kind of like, what is even American culture to you? I think myth has a lot to do with it. But like when most people, especially outside of America, think of American culture, they have a certain picture. It can be very hard to say what American culture is because it's so many different things. But like, was there an aspect of taking this kind of small slice or this narrow slice of American culture, which also holds a lot within it, and kind of figuring out what that microcosm said about the whole? Yeah, it's funny you say that because like, in some ways, this book being set in the Midwest is almost incidental.
23:12It's just where I happen to live. In other ways, it had to be the Midwest because though it is perhaps the most misunderstood region of America, I think that's because it presents as so conservative on the surface, or at least that's the stereotype. You know, this sort of like pie on the windowsill, small town familiarity and like a place of great like tradition. And sometimes that is true. But I think if that is true, then necessarily the the bottom of the iceberg has to be even more mysterious. You know, if there's this culture of of repression, then what is being repressed has to be like doubly interesting, I think.
23:56I love that. You know, and so in that way, like it could be a microcosm of American culture or of American traditionalism. And it's like that I gone. I'm such a broken record with the David Lynch shit. But it's like that that's why he's the best, because it's like I mean, it's so obvious to say, but like the worms wriggling under the manicured green lawn, you know, for me, that's cool because I mentioned this in the book. But when I grew up, I was so convinced that like I live in the most boring place ever, you know, the suburbs and in the middle of middle America. So it's very it's very uplifting, actually, to sort of like burrow into what's beneath the repression or the familiarity.
24:42Meaghan Garvey:Yeah, you don't mention too many like suburban big box stores or like McDonald's. I mean, you probably mentioned McDonald's. I don't know if you mentioned McDonald's in the book, but like the things that you would see like while driving across America that are just, you know, the same in every town, no matter where you are. And you're like, this is so weird. I could be in any state right now, like a strip mall or whatever. You don't. That's like very absent from the book. Yeah. And I mean, that's obviously like by omission because so much of the Midwest and so much of America is that where it's like blind, take off the blindfold and spin you around and you don't know if you're in like Ohio or Tennessee or South Carolina.
25:24I don't know if I mentioned McDonald's. I definitely mentioned Dollar General, though, because to me, like Dollar General is even fucking worse than McDonald's because it actually there's no apparently there's more Dollar Generals now in this country than McDonald's, which is fucking psycho.
25:40Meaghan Garvey:I also feel like I grew up in New York City and I did not know what Dollar General was until for a stint I moved to North Carolina. Do you know, like, Andrea, do you see Dollar Generals in L.A.? I don't know if they have them in that side of the country. Okay, you do. I have one like 15 minutes from me, yeah. I had no idea. I knew about, for example, food deserts, but I had no idea that that was like in many parts of rural America, that was like the only place where you could buy food for miles and miles. Oh, yeah. And I was like, oh, my God. And sometimes by design, I mean, that's kind of their strategy where like occasionally, I mean, there's some saying where it's like open up a trailer park and a Dollar General will open like a week later.
26:22But sometimes it's the case that the Dollar General will move into a small town, undercut the grocery store that exists there until they go out of business. You know, that's kind of like my strategy. It's fucking so evil.
26:34Meaghan Garvey:That is wild. But yeah, that kind of brings me to, well, how did you find all these other places? Drew and I called them Megan places because we were recently on a trip and we were like reading the book and looking for places that were off the beaten path in the way that the, you know, obviously very different. We were in coastal Connecticut, but we found, it was through word of mouth that we found our Megan places. But I'm curious how you found these like bars that were log cabins in the middle of the forest. I don't know if they're on Google or. Yeah. Same thing when I was reading the book. Like I knew that you were probably most of the time driving past stuff that was very homogenized and wasn't necessarily that distinctive or different.
27:14Like what would tell you that a place was interesting or worth stopping? It's funny because in I feel like most of the book I should have I probably should have spread out more. But I really focused on like the upper Midwest. and the north of Wisconsin and Michigan and Minnesota is surprisingly immune to this like homogenous sprawl that we're talking about. I mean, there's hardly any chain restaurants in the Upper Peninsula and the Northwoods of Wisconsin is kind of like that too. A lot of those places really are like, you don't have to search that hard to find like the character and the old shit.
27:50But I do have a sort of like, God, I hate that I'm going to use this word, But like you guys know what Lindy is the concept of Lindy. But I do kind of buy into that shit where it's like the older, the better. So it's like if something's been around for 100 years, I'm going to fucking go there. So I'm always looking up like oldest bar in whatever town, oldest restaurant in whatever town. But I also I get a lot of emails from like really weird people and I take them all very seriously. And I'll take like I'll usually take their advice. So like if a stranger emails me and it's like you've got to go to this fucking bar, I'm like, OK, sold.
28:23like I'll go but I also and this is the part that like I fucking even annoy myself when I say shit like this but I really do believe it like I think that like god I think that intuition is like kind of like the lost facet of good writing you know there's like hard work and there's talent but like instinct is up there too and I feel like people have fucking bad instincts nowadays but I feel like through a life of like extreme trial and error I've really like honed my relationship with my intuition and so that again this is so annoying but i feel like i just have a fucking knack of like you can drop me into a town and like i'm gonna find the fucking portal you know
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29:01Meaghan Garvey:you think that that's also paradoxically like an impulse that comes from growing up in a big city definitely when i was growing up in new york city like the whole like the whole thing to do if you're like a local is be like oh we hate these spots that transplants go to and we're going to drive out to this obscure restaurant in Queens or something like does that kind of is that a culture that you also grew up with in Chicago interesting I don't really feel I don't feel like that was totally my experience I feel like mine came more from this sort of like magical thinking with regard to books of like I am going to open up this book and I'm going to find exactly what I'm looking for and oftentimes that is the case you know was it were you basically just looking for places that like you wanted to go where the locals went or what like the main sort of town hub was like town third space or whatever yeah and I think that that's pretty easy I keep speaking for the Midwest I keep saying things that are true of the Midwest that are probably completely universal but I do think that's particularly in the Midwest like you know there's like third space whatever like we're losing our third spaces but I feel like tavern culture in the Midwest is like more serious than it is anywhere else in the country so i mean you you can look at these possibly fake maps that they put on twitter sometimes where it's like you know the drunkest state whatever it's like it's all in fucking wisconsin michigan you know so i don't think we have tavern i don't i don't really even know what it like it was all very kind of foreign to me oh really we're just like you it seems like a lot of the places you go to have these common even like interior design elements like the tiffany lamps and signs for certain beers and things like that of taxidermy animals yeah totally it's like that it's like the north woods like hunting cabin style um but yeah like the local spots it's like yeah it's gonna be at the fucking that one bar that obviously like you could just tell from the looks of it like that's the spot that's the local spot and it's like that that's just always the case so which is very convenient for me because i'm always trying to like wander my own interests through my life in journalism so it's like oh gee I gotta go to the bar because that's where like storytelling is occurring.
31:15I find it really interesting that you said that at least the region that you were exploring and there is a cool little map of it also at the beginning of the book that people should check out. You were saying that it seemed like a lot of those spots actually maybe were immune to the kind of suburban erasure or sprawl erasure homogenization that we were talking about that you see a lot of other places. Why do you think that is that's really interesting to me i think this is um like a major downside of living in a major city is that like there's enough capital to like incentivize gentrification but in a place like i often compare milwaukee to chicago um milwaukee feels in many ways like the chicago that i remember from the 90s because there's just not as much incentive to replace the hundred year old restaurant with the sweet green you know i think there's like not as many incentives in smaller towns to like whitewash everything into that like any town usa fucking pilates studio
32:19Meaghan Garvey:monotony probably has to do also with just cost of living and cost of running a business like if those places can still afford they still have patrons and they can still afford to you know like outpriced yeah maybe they own the building yeah totally i guess kind of what i was thinking about is that you know I've spent a lot of time in the like southwest like Nevada Arizona and then like eastern southern California you know where it's just like desert and weird and I think about how because a lot of those spaces have their own version of that where it's not necessarily like yoga studios but it is you know Denny's or Chili's or like chain spots coming in to replace the dives or the other sort of local cultural third spaces but there always is a point where if you drive far enough the corporations just kind of gave up I guess or they stop and it's just kind of stayed you know preserved in its own strange juices I'm just always curious about like what establishes those kind of invisible boundaries so I don't know if like for you it was just those places were far enough out that they like evaded the reach of big boxes and chain brands but yeah I think that's true I don't know maybe this is my like anti-New York bias speaking but um I've been very uplifted by what I consider to be like subcultural aspects of the small town Midwest sometimes like I find to take the example of Wisconsin like Wisconsin has real subculture in a way that like is so apparent in a sense in a way that I don't even get from from a place like New York where like there's these weird traditions of like supper clubs and like a Friday fish fry Like all these traditions that are so like everyone participates in.
34:00Yeah, I don't know. I just I drive around a place like Wisconsin and I feel that subculture in a way that I never did when I lived in frickin Brooklyn, you know. And that blows my mind and makes me really happy.
34:17Meaghan Garvey:If you like what you're hearing on this episode, there's a place where you can join the conversation. It's called Cujoplex, and it's a private online hangout zone on Discord where smart, cool weirdos just like you, you know, people who like talking about the evolving state of independent culture, can congregate, share links, and talk about the news of the day. We've had some great conversations lately about creative economies, media theory, AI, politics, the future of journalism, and even the records and TV shows we've been obsessing over this year. Some of our chats have even inspired episode ideas.
34:52Meaghan Garvey:You can get access to Kujoplex along with our monthly bonus episodes by signing up for a paid subscription over at our Substack. That's theculturejournalist.substack.com. So did you feel like these kind of places were under threat when you were out there? or was it just, again, surprisingly well-preserved and maybe felt like they had staying power in spite of it all, in spite of the content flattening and superficial accessibility that's now been spurred by social media and all that? I mean, what I tend to think about more is what's going to happen when the boomers die. I think that has more, that seems like more of a threat to these places that I love than like social media homogeny.
35:38No, that's 100 % it, actually. I think that's what's underlying all of what I was just describing. Yeah, totally. Yeah, I think what's keeping all this shit alive is boomers. And, you know, obviously, boomers get a bad rap. But but sometimes I freak out because I'm like, oh, my God, like when these boomers die, are there like rotten millennial kids going to like keep the supper club alive? I don't know. It fucking freaks me out. And that's not even getting into this whole, like, I don't know how true these stats are about Gen Z and drinking and going out. But sometimes it freaks me out. I'm like, and this makes me sound like such an alcoholic.
36:14I'm like, are my favorite bars going to be there in 20 years? But I don't know. It's a concern. So I don't know. I got to hand the boomers that one.
36:23Meaghan Garvey:Did it seem like these kinds of towns, were the younger generations leaving them or still around? A lot of times, no. Actually, I would say that in I'll use the example again of like the Wisconsin supper clubs, but oftentimes it was like the fourth generation of the family washing the dishes and the third generation of the family is bartending at this supper club that was started in 1957 by their grandparents or something. So I wouldn't say in every case it seems like the young people were leaving. But in certain cases, I went to this island called Washington Island off the tip of Door County in Wisconsin the other week.
37:03And this is an island of like 700 people year round. And it seemed like everyone who lived there full time was a retired boomer and their kids come home from the summer, but they're living in the big city doing marketing. So, yeah, I think 50-50.
37:18Meaghan Garvey:I wonder if people will start and maybe they already have, but like I wrote this article for Vice a really long time ago about like neo New York businesses where it's like opening a pizza place now that looks like a pizza place from the 70s. And that's like a big trend. I wonder if that will happen where there's like hip chefs moving into, you know, an area and then opening a replica supper club that is a gentrification supper club. Yeah. Or if that would happen in a city. Yeah. I think that like in smaller towns, they're not going to let that shit fly. But I think I do see oftentimes like these urban supper clubs that opened in 2024.
38:01You know what I mean?
38:03Meaghan Garvey:Yeah. Which, you know, it is what it is. After Trump got elected, first elected in 2016, anyone who was like working at a media company at the time remembers this moment where the publications, like the execs were like, oh, shit, we don't understand America. We don't understand the heartland. We have to send reporters into these places to cover real America. Yeah. And I guess I'm curious about like, from your experiences, reporting on an area like this that they would put into this category, what are we kind of unable to see or what gets erased when these representations are coming from people who aren't from there.
38:44Meaghan Garvey:And like, is there any way in which this book kind of comes from an annoyance at that very like lib impulse? Oh, yeah, totally. In some ways, it all comes from that annoyance. And then in another way, I wanted to find a way to write a book about this moment in America where politics are only something that's sort of like a flicker at the margins, you know like a rustling of the curtain and you're like what's over there but I wanted to like leave it out entirely while also having it like imprinted on everything you know what I mean and I always struggle with how to say this without sounding like I think that we should all just like hold hands across the political divide and like love everyone because some people are just fucking stupid.
39:33But on the other hand, I do perhaps naively feel that the way that politics has sunk its claws into literally every facet of American life is psycho. And I generally find that the people I meet are much more interesting and nuanced than their voting record would suggest, You know, so I don't know if I have the answer of like, what are the coastal elite libs missing in like understanding the heart of America. But I think what everyone is kind of driving themselves mad over is this sort of like lib impulse to kind of behave as if differing political opinions are contagious and will like taint them by exposure, you know.
40:22And again, it sounds so hokey, but I have only found my own positions clarified and strengthened by exposure to people who feel completely different than me. And I also find that people are generally much friendlier in real life than the news and the internet would suggest.
40:44Meaghan Garvey:And you don't like obviously you do like talk to end up inadvertently talking to this in owner who is a Nazi at one point. But we don't experience you having that many political conversations with people. But I kind of a vibe that I got from the book was this sort of the median voter kind of vibe of like when you actually talk to people who are not in kind of a liberal bubble. their thinking is it's not like one way it's sort of all over the place and like everyone you meet will have kind of different ideas about things and it's like there's more like variety and people will say crazy shit and people don't sound how you think they're going to sound based on what I mean sometimes they do but like they might pick and choose from a variety of different political philosophies and combine them in unforeseen and surprising ways yeah completely and I mean as we all do and it's like that horrible term NPC you know what I mean it's like people think that they have a fucking monopoly on like nuance and interiority and like surprise you know okay I like I'm gonna be a hater I got really into audiobooks this summer and I kind of listened to like trashy shit on my audiobooks and so I was I was listening to this book that came out earlier this year that kind of caused controversy called Adult Braces by Lindy West.
42:07And this people were talking about this because she was in this like polyamorous, horrible love triangle. But the conceit of this book is that her relationship is really weird. So she goes on this road trip across America from, I think, the Pacific Northwest to the Florida Keys and back. And she has this like pretense of she's going to like see the real America. And throughout, she'll come upon a person who is MAGA coded, who's maybe wearing camo but in one instance she's in a southern state and a man is selling honey on the side of the road and she's like well i'm confused because this man is clearly maga but he's selling honey and honey is good but maga is bad so what's going on and i'm like well why even bother leaving your fucking house if every person you encounter is exactly who you project them to be you know fucking stay home you know and i and i'm totally being a hater but yeah like it seems so sesame street obvious but like not everyone is like who your weird bias i mean that's like maybe being a hater but i think that also is like a good encapsulation of like exactly the issue we're talking about here that i think your book confronts or that flouts i don't know what the right word is but yeah totally does the opposite of yeah and how are you gonna like if you do have
43:20Meaghan Garvey:a political stance how are you ever going to build a coalition if you don't talk to people who think differently than you or you immediately shut them down and say you're evil right 100 and like perhaps your beliefs are not as strong as you think they are if they can't bounce off opposing ones you know if you can't have like a if you can't stand up to someone and like state your claim and and not back down and and not like crumble you know totally it was definitely really crazy when that in owner turned up can you tell that story really quickly yeah yeah that was wild dude this was so crazy so i got compelled by this fucking what what people might call ruin porn which is i think a silly term but like i saw these pictures of this old crumbling ghost town at the very southern tip of illinois which is funny because it's in the midwest but it may as well be the deep south for how it feels but anyway i wanted to go here this is a town called cairo Illinois and it's just endured like 70 years of like the harshest neglect you can imagine.
44:23I don't know. I thought it would be kind of interesting to see. But as soon as I got down there, I got this like horrible feeling like I should not be here. This is so dark. So I stayed at this like old Victorian bed and breakfast in the neighboring town called Mound City, which of course is built on these like old native burial mounds like cursed as fuck. This is one of those places where there's no grocery store, there's no restaurant, there's no bar, there's no gas station, And there's a Dollar General in the next town where you can get all your shit. So it's haunted vibes. So I go to this bed and breakfast.
44:52Nobody's there except this like electrician guy and the innkeeper. And he's like, hey, welcome. You know, he asked me what I do. I'm like, I'm a writer. He's like, oh, I'm a writer, too. I'm like, cool. Like, do you have anything I could read? He's like, maybe later. All right.
45:07Meaghan Garvey:He gives me a glass. Like a little cagey about it. Totally. So he gives me some wine. I'm drinking wine on the porch. The sun sets. I come in. He's like, here's some more wine. And would you like to see a YouTube video that's going to blow your mind? I'm like, fuck yeah. So we watched this video and it quickly becomes very confusing. And like, I really I'm not going to explain this fucking conspiracy theory. But if your listeners are interested, you've got to look up the Tartarian Empire. It's fucking weird. And it makes no sense. And this is one of those videos where like the guy starts talking really fast and you like flash the symbol of like the dollar bill pyramid.
45:42and it's like it's just like fucking totally incoherent so anyhow we end up watching like conspiracy theory youtube videos for like three hours which i'm totally down for because i feel like to be a good reporter you kind of have to like set aside your moral judgment if you want the story and i always want the fucking story so i'm like yeah whatever man like let's watch these conspiracy videos that are all kind of pointing in the direction of like Jews. So we're getting drunk and we're watching these videos. And at the end of this like marathon YouTube session, he hands me his manifesto and he's like, read this in your room.
46:22I'm like, all right. Title is like the greatest architect, master of his people, accomplished artists that this world has ever known. I'm like, oh my God, this better not be fucking flipped to page three. huge picture of Hitler oh my god and then I come to so I'm like I'm I'm reading the thing like I want to know and yeah it's just like this love letter to Hitler and so like the next morning I come down to breakfast I'm like oh my god like do I have to discuss the paper or make discuss the paper we did not discuss the paper whatsoever I ate eggs and toast and I got the fuck out of there
46:57Meaghan Garvey:it's like also crazy because you're like isolated in this restore he's like it's like a beautiful restored old house yeah and he was the one who restored it because he was an architect hence his like fascination with like hitler's architecture i don't even know like i don't even know but like by all accounts he was like this great guy who was like trying to restore this crumbling town that's been neglected and wild there's another line that we both really love that we just wanted to flag and ask you to talk about a little bit and so i'm just gonna read the quote here. But then I'm always falling for the people I find in the dark corners of the Midwest, a whole universe of strangers beneath what presents as a region of small-town familiarity.
47:41I meet the people of Black River Falls the same way I meet men in bars, as an interloper, someone just passing through. I like to hear their stories, to get lost in their lives, which are almost always crazier than they seem on the surface. They remind me that our lives are far more interesting than modernity has led us to believe. Explain that thought a little more. I feel like after like a, I don't know, more than a decade in the trenches of culture journalism, you kind of come away with this idea that we live in a dystopian hellscape that is not really worth exploring with anything other than like rancor.
48:22And that the salvation in all of this is culture, is, you know, pop culture. And for a while, I think I, maybe without really being conscious of this, bought into that too. And then this sort of reckoning, this sort of like post-COVID or like I'm in my 30s reckoning that I was talking about before, I started to think that this was actually kind of like a diabolical notion and that, you know, the opposite was true. And maybe the opposite was true, especially as I sort of like looked at the pop landscape and like, well, this is fucking trash, you know? And so I think I think what I'm talking about in that section is my little shove against that idea that like our world is on fire, which in many ways it is.
49:09But I like outright reject this sort of incentive to just crawl in our pods and order DoorDash and watch Netflix for the rest of time and like write off America because it's crumbling and bad. All right. It's crumbling and bad, but like it's beautiful and it's crazy. It's nuts. Like I love America because it's the fucking craziest place ever. And as a writer, I have a front row seat. It's amazing. You know?
49:35Meaghan Garvey:Yeah, I totally see that. Well, yeah, in that same vein, I want to talk a little bit about the book in terms of a piece of literature, in terms of a piece of, I hate this term, but long form content. Yeah. You know, that I think sort of also reflects what you were talking about, like on a meta level, you know, there have been some comparisons to Hunter S. Thompson. It's been, I've seen the book filled as a piece of gonzo journalism. Was there a tradition in terms of storytelling that feels lost today, maybe, that you wanted to tap into with this project? Like, is there something that maybe we used to see more of in literature, but that we don't anymore that you wanted to explore or dig into with this?
50:16Yeah, I don't know. I think the Hunter Thompson comparison is funny. I'm like, why? Because I do drugs. She's on the road and doing drugs. Gotta be Gonzo. Totally. But it sort of like starts and ends there, if you ask me. I feel like I would say who I very like nakedly try to emulate more so than that. And that I wish I saw more in contemporary literature, I guess. My favorite writer is Lucia Berlin. I was so happy when I discovered her because she writes about abject things in a way that juxtaposes them with like utter lushness and beauty and recklessness and awe of life with a velocity that sort of implies a rejection of victimhood.
51:03And, you know, nevertheless, like she's a single mother of four who's destroying herself on Jim Beam. But like the way she writes about it is so like offers herself no pity and comes with this attitude that like, you know, life's horrible, but it's also so fun. And I really hope to channel that and to channel some sort of like ultimate optimism, even if it's like totally foolish in a way that I think I don't know. I read a lot of, oftentimes I turn to like the hip happening new books and they're written with such a flat like SSRI affect that I think reflects like internet culture. But that's what I turn to books to escape, you know.
51:45So I think I wanted to channel a liveliness and a sort of naive optimism that I find lacking.
51:54Meaghan Garvey:Are there any artists that are not writers that you feel aligned with in perspective and approach as far as representing America. Like I think maybe this is too on the nose, but I remember your Salem profile for the New York Times that went crazy. And I was so jealous because I love Salem. I would love to interview them. But it's a little bit of a, like when I look at Jack Donahue's Instagram, I catch a little bit of a similar. Oh, yeah. I mean, I think I actually made some sort of like coded reference to Salem at some part of the book where I talked about like the music that I listened to in my early 20s that sort of channeled this feeling of being like young and alive at the end of the world at the end of history and it's like you know no culture no future no going forth in glory but like maybe we can party so yeah Salem's a fucking big one for sure and I think another midwestern example that I would use kind of on the opposite end of the spectrum would be John Prine in this sort of like totally modest but awestruck little stories that mostly revolve around the midwest and there's certain songs of his where um you have to sort of like connect the dots yourself between verse one two and three and it's sort of your job to make sense of it and i sort of wanted my book to be the same way too it's like okay what conclusions can we draw between like my personal like fucking weird uh decision my horrible decisions and my sort of like cultural anthropology like where where we ended up between that wasn't there like a scene in the book where you were like with a guy and not getting along and he's kind of scary but then you listen to john prine on the way home literally and then yeah yeah and then you for a moment are like yeah i was like maybe everything's gonna be all right and then like he drops me off and i'm like i will literally never speak to you again you're horrible i also want to just say i appreciate the shout out to lucia berlin too because I feel like when it comes to the like gutsy female nonfiction cultural observer or storyteller, it's so often just like the spectrum of just like, are you a Babbitts or are you a Didion?
54:01You know, which like obviously love, respect both. But Berlin gets forgotten about a lot in that. And there's so much more. Oh, totally. Berlin, I think I was so excited to discover because I was getting a little burnt out on my former hero, Eve Babbitts. Not to say that I've like totally discarded her, but at a certain point I would be reading her stuff and I would feel like she was fucking lying to me you know because everything is just like bougainvillea and like crispy tacos and hot sex and it's like oh my god I've read what your friend wrote about you in the 80s where your cats are running around your apartment getting high because there's coke on like bloody kleenex all over the floor and it was like what was left out started like screaming at me and it started to feel like dishonest not I mean everyone has the right to like write whatever they want and leave omit whatever they want but but I liked Berlin And it didn't feel like that to me.
54:49Meaghan Garvey:Yeah, totally. People tend to romanticize this idea of writers going out on the road. And yet there was, as you admit, kind of an element of sacrificing a quote unquote normal life for even, you know, your personal health at times. What do you think you learned, if anything, through living through the reporting of this book or feel like you took back home with you? or was that still sort of an open question at the end? Well, it's funny. With this sort of romanticized rote story thing, and I don't mean to turn this into a fucking feminist thing, but usually that voice is male. And I was really tripped out after I finished reporting and writing.
55:36I was tripped out by how much, how do I put this? In sort of like cliched abject literature by alcoholic men, let's say, I always find it shocking how little their body comes into it because you see some sort of like Bukowski guy drinking himself to ruin or a Hunter Thompson doing his thing. And you never see the part where they're like, oh, my God, I feel like a fat piece of shit. you know and I think it really tripped me out how much I thought I would have such a pure feeling of achievement after I finished writing this book and really what I felt was this shocking disconnect between like mind and body where I could not stop thinking like oh my god I'm so lazy I've just been like sitting here writing and like driving around drinking and my vanity kicked in.
56:32So there was like this weird surge of vanity where I almost couldn't like focus on the book that I'd written because I was like, you better start working out. Like you've just been like being like a, like a beer guzzling slob. And I, and I felt that kind of interesting and I don't want to be too triggering and, you know, go into that whole thing. But it sort of shocked me how much I wasn't past a lot of like feminine vanity. That really scared me actually. And it sort of like made me think about this ideal of like the female picaresque or however you pronounce that word where it's sort of like a foolish person moving through the world and I realized like a part of that as like a woman I think is it's hard to cast off fixations about like beauty and aging and health you know I don't know it was weird and I'm still like grappling with that.
57:22Well I think especially now too because of how much image is tied to one's success as a creative person you know, even as writers, it's like we have to be visible. So it's like actually kind of harder to escape that even more now. Yeah, totally. And then I had this feeling where I was like, oh my gosh, like I'm turning 40 this year and I'm like, maybe I'll lose my entire journalistic beat, which is like talking to strangers and trying to like draw from them their secrets. You know, like I started to think like maybe I'm only pulling this off because I'm like a youngish woman, you know, like is that going to expire?
57:57And that's been like really freaking me out to think about. I stress out about all the time, like covering that kind of stuff, just culture in general or being like, am I going to be 60 years old and trying to talk to bands or trying to be like a cultural interloper? I don't know. But again, like Didion did it, I guess. Yeah.
58:13Meaghan Garvey:Not to sound all feminist, but I feel like people don't ask that of like men as much. It's just like, oh, you're a guy who is a lifelong music critic and you're senior and august now. Yes, exactly. Yeah, totally. no it's hard to picture that maybe ellen willis is like you know ellen willis yeah like i feel like she might be the only example of that that i can think of like someone who until the end of her life was like this prestigious rock critic yeah yeah and she she's awesome i guess like ann powers is still out there doing it but she's a little old but you know no i'm thinking more of like iconic older sorry she's iconic but an older generation than that yeah no it really trips me out and I don't know like and it's weird that like I answered that question with that but it's like it's so front of mind and then I was like okay I gotta go on this book tour like better get hot like how hot can I get before this and I was like dude like you should be past this you're like a woman of the mind you know but it's like man you can't escape it it's fucked up does this kind of come to a head with that chapter where you go to like the lumberjack competition and you're you're around mostly men you talk mostly about male athletes I assume they're female athletes but it's like this wholesome thing and everyone is like young and spry and athletic and you have the beers in your backpack is that like I love that chapter I thought it felt like an important emotional turn totally yeah no that's one of those things I don't know sometimes you're around really like being around athletes sometimes makes me feel like the biggest piece of shit as a writer And I'm like, oh, my gosh, they're like all their life is like pointing in this one direction towards like one moment of glory.
59:56And they've got this physical discipline and they've been a good sport, like being a good loser. And I'm just like ruthlessly like competing for fucking nothing to write 500 words a day and like have so much spite for my writers.
1:00:10Meaghan Garvey:It's like, God, I'm such a piece of shit. But imagine how like they must really feel this anxiety around aging. to maybe there's like some kind of feeling of an implicit rule that you can't be an older woman talking to bands but there's no actual you can do this for the rest of your you really can yeah the rest of your life whereas an athlete there's like and often it's 40 there is an ex a feeling of an expiration date yeah entirely totally but yeah like you said that your editor was like so into this idea of you driving off to the midwest and figuring out what happened to your life um What do you think you found?
1:00:48Meaghan Garvey:Do you feel like ultimately this exercise was finding something or escaping something or a little bit of both? I was wondering what this book was kind of going to be about as I was writing it in the sense of like, OK, it's about driving through the Midwest. But like, what is like the sun around which these planets are orbiting, you know? And I was like, is the sun the idea that like my mom died when I was 21 and I'm like stuck in that age forever? something and haven't processed it the answer was kind of no like that that's not what it's about and then it was like is it about the fact that like you know I'm pushing 40 and have like what some might consider like a serious substance abuse problem the answer was no like it's not really about that either and I sort of realized that it was about this thing I mentioned earlier of like feeling very natural in the role of the stranger this sort of person who drifts in and drifts out.
1:01:43And in some ways, I like find that more inspiring and compelling in like my relationships with people that I'll never meet again than people I've known my entire life. Not to say that I don't love my friends and family, but it's like that doesn't really draw from me good writing. So that was kind of like a weird one. I'd never really like considered that before. But I definitely want to add that I've been listening to a lot or listening because I do this audiobook thing, but I've been listening to a lot of memoirs. I'll pretty much listen to like any memoir that there is, especially by women, because I'm very interested in sort of people's relationships with their self-delusion that you can sort of like get from their memoirs.
1:02:24And it kind of got me thinking that when women write about their own lives, there's this kind of expectation that it's about vulnerability, you know, whereas like, I think I feel more like this masculine mode of like performance rather than like expression or like being vulnerable and I came to this conclusion that like I really liked the idea of writing a memoir where I end up in the same fucking place where I started you know there was no grand conclusion there was no revelation I'm doing the same fucking thing and I probably still will be and I kind of like that that felt real it would feel phony to be like and then I learned x you know I love that as the takeaway from it and in its own way maybe like larger existential way that almost in this whole unstable distorted reality milieu that we find ourselves in that that almost becomes its own kind of form of agency and stability yeah totally or could be looked at that way yeah sort of similar to that you point out in the beginning of the book and we touched on this a little bit at the top of the conversation that when you were talking about Wisconsin death's trip essentially like shit was crazy then and people were reckoning with a lot of the same things then that we are now, you know, like economic decline, technological disruption, loneliness, like general destabilization of reality.
1:03:46Is there a kind of comfort maybe in realizing that maybe it's always been this way, you know, and what can we learn from that? Yeah, 100%. That's like what I say is like sadistically uplifting about the book Wisconsin Death Trip is like totally we we all like I Probably every generation comes to the same conclusion of, oh, my God, the end is nigh. The big one's coming. We live in the most chaotic, disruptive, unstable time that there ever has been to be alive. And, you know, then somehow we just keep fucking rolling, you know, and then the next generation comes to that conclusion. And I'm always like, it's very important for me personally to like fight against that impulse of like, oh, my God, it's unprecedentedly crazy right now.
1:04:35And that's why that book is such like a weird bomb in exactly that way. It's like not that it's great to realize that people 130 years ago were having the same paranoias of their neighbors and realizing that their government only existed to like rob them blind, basically. but in a way it is it is comforting of like yeah it's crazy now it's always been crazy and somehow we just keep on trucking i get a lot i get this like weird patriotism from that almost
1:05:03Meaghan Garvey:amen no me too um so yeah i hope that you don't take this the wrong way but this book gave me a feeling that i've only gotten from one other book in the last two years which was leave society by Tao Lin. It's a very different book, very different voice. I guess the story is like, well, he's on a journey to health, perfect health. Well, you're on a different journey from that. But it has this very similar feeling of being not just a story you're following from a reader perspective, sort of a philosophy of life or of exit or of a way of seeing the world. Like, as I said, like it inspired me to experience my vacation and my trip differently.
1:05:53Meaghan Garvey:In that vein, is there like a Megan philosophy of life or I don't know, just like something, even in the wholesome sense that you want people to take away from it? Oh, hell yeah. Hell yeah. Here's the thing. I should have said this at the beginning when, when you said, is this a memoir? It's like, no, this is my manifesto, dude. This is my fucking manifesto secretly i'm just like hiding it in this form of like personal journey but it's my fucking manifesto and and the manifesto is about like that's gonna sound so sappy but like i wholeheartedly believe this that beauty and wonder and in in this sort of like transcendentalist sense is still there for us everywhere everywhere in the most fucking seemingly boring shithole town in america like beauty and wonder and amusement and tragedy and horror you know is all there as long as you're looking like really looking really listening and not seeing what you want not projecting not seeing what you wish to see or what you're afraid of like just really looking and listening and in that way like um I don't know it kind of like I don't want to say like saved my life writing this book but like I used to be a melancholy bitch and I really I really love being alive now because it's like in the fucking like shittiest place ever well this is the good thing about being a writer is like even the fucking worst most embarrassing tragic shit is like well as a writer the more you lose the more you win you know but yeah the manifesto is like god i don't know it's all out there man it's all fucking out there we don't live in hell we don't it sucks but we don't even imagining just like you could do this yourself you could take a little bit of time and explore America or what it really is yourself and, you know, dropping out.
1:07:42Meaghan Garvey:I mean, dropping out is such an American tradition anyway, right? Like that's a very important part of American identity. Totally. Totally. Yeah. Well, Megan, tell us where can people find you, find your work and also, of course, cop the book. Okay. So here's my little brag portion of the podcast. Is that... Hit us, hit us. The book's actually in its second printing right now so you're gonna have to wait hell yeah love to hear it yeah but it should be back in stores very shortly i don't know at all the normal places you buy books but um in the meanwhile i've got this sub stack that i think is i think it's one of the only good sub stacks actually oh my god i became such a douche at the end of this podcast but um but my sub stack is called scary cool sad goodbye and i don't know i think it's dope cool is this the first book in a series that this publisher is putting out that are kind of all about different American subcultures or American stories or something?
1:08:41I think it's all American writers broadly, but I would say that's the only thing that they have in common. I actually have no idea what's coming up next, but.
1:08:49Meaghan Garvey:Are you going to write like a part to, could you do this in like different places? Like, oh yeah. I think you might do something like that. Yeah, completely. I feel like I have to do one in the southwest because like I get really scared when I'm in the southwest for some reason. You gotta do it dude. It's so scary. I love it. Yeah. Like when I go to the when I'm in like New Mexico I'm like I'm in trouble. Like they're after me. It's like who's they? I don't know but I think it's worth it. It's a whole ass energy. Yeah. I was also gonna ask like you must have been out to like the Salton Sea or like East Jesus or wherever.
1:09:24No. No but I've heard of it. someone was telling me that the Salton Sea is one of the most like cursed places they've ever been okay next time you're gonna hit me up we'll go out there you're gonna okay hell yeah hell yeah yeah serious I mean it seriously it's incredible yeah okay thanks so much again for coming on oh my god it was my pleasure
1:09:45this episode of the culture journalist was produced and edited by Emily Friedlander and me Andrea Dominic. To check out more, head to our Substack. That's theculturejournalist.substack.com. And if you like what you're hearing, leave a rating or review on Apple Podcasts, or share us with friends to help support independent journalism.
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CUJO is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. Episodes drop every other week, but if you want the full experience, we recommend signing up for a paid subscription. Paid subscribers also get access to our CUJOPLEX Discord and The Weather Report, a monthly episode series where we take stock of where the cultural winds are blowing and tell you what’s rained into our brains.
Hey pals. This week, we savor the final moments of summer with the author of our favorite non-fiction book this year. Her name is Meaghan Garvey — you probably know her as one of the best music journalists in the game — and the book is Midwestern Death Trip, which chronicles a period where she purchased a used red Cadillac and spent her days driving to far-flung corners of rural Wisconsin, Michigan, and Illinois, drinking in taxidermy-adorned supper clubs and dive bars and trying to “re-enchant” her life. It’s part memoir, part outsider history of a place, and part on-the-ground reckoning with a part of America often flattened into political abstraction. Though, if you really wanna boil it down, it is — as Meaghan puts it — a manifesto.
We discuss Meaghan’s contention that American culture is actually way more interesting, psychedelic, and varied than it’s cracked up to be; what her weeklong benders taught her about both her relationship with herself and Americans’ relationships with one another; and what it’s like to occupy the lonely position of a female writer compared to Hunter S. Thompson (and why she’s actually more of a Lucia Berlin).
Purchase Midwestern Death Trip at Country Highway and at local booksellers (second edition forthcoming)
Subscribe to Meaghan’s excellent Substack SCARY COOL SAD GOODBYE
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