Amy Butcher is an award-winning essayist and author of Mothertrucker, a book that interrogates the realities of female fear, abusive relationships, and America’s quiet epidemic of intimate partner violence set against the geography of remote, northern Alaska. Excerpts of Mothertrucker won an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, and in July 2019, Mothertrucker was optioned by Makeready Films for film development with Primetime Emmy-winning Joey Soloway directing and Academy and Golden Globe-winning actress Julianne Moore in a starring role. Butcher’s first book, Visiting Hours, earned starred reviews and praise from The New York Times Sunday Review of Books, NPR, The Star Tribune, Kirkus Reviews, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, and others.
Butcher earned her MFA from the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program and is the 2012-2013 recipient of Colgate University’s Olive B. O’Connor Creative Writing Fellowship in nonfiction, as well as grants and awards from the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, the Ohio Arts Council, Word Riot Inc., and the Stanley Foundation for International Research. She is the Director of Creative Writing and an Associate Professor of English at Ohio Wesleyan University and teaches annually at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival and the Sitka Fine Arts Camp in Sitka, Alaska.
She lives in Ohio with her three rescue dogs.
EB: Let’s start with my favorite opening question: how did you begin writing nonfiction? Why nonfiction and not fiction or poetry or something else?
AB: In a lot of ways, I feel like my life has come full circle. I considered myself a fiction writer and poet in college, mostly because there was only one offering at my small liberal arts college—Gettysburg College—in the personal essay, and it sounded, at least to me at that young age, far less sexy, less creative. But eventually I exhausted all the fiction and poetry classes and so, during my senior year, I enrolled in the personal essay course. That class was taught by Kathryn Rhett, and she is brilliant. She assigned the Best American Essays collection for whichever year proceeded the offering, which as an educator now I realize was a huge annual undertaking in terms of prep, and that year’s edition had David Foster Wallace guest editing. There were so many beautiful and incredible essays in that edition. In particular, I read Jo Ann Beard’s “Werner” and became completely obsessed with it. I had no idea the genre could be so creative, that it could, in many ways, read like fiction but with this added element of true and lived human experience. So that fall, I applied to MFA programs, and I applied in all genres to cast a wide net, but in the end the best opportunity was for me to go into nonfiction at the University of Iowa. I owe so much to those educators.
EB: Okay, so let’s talk about Mothertrucker. First, let me say, it was one of those books that I found myself stalling to finish because I did not want it to end.
AB: Thank you.
EB: How did you come to want to write about Joy, the female trucker who is the subject Mothertrucker?
AB: I knew I already loved Alaska. I spend every summer teaching at a non-profit arts education camp in southeastern Alaska, which I’ve written about in various ways before, and my first thought for this book was that it would be a collection of essays about people I’d met in Alaska, focusing specifically on women who work in Alaska’s many male-dominated industries. I found Joy through her Instagram and figured she would be the focus of one of the essays or chapters, but never the basis of a longer work. I reached out to her, I went to visit her, and we were only together for about a week, but there is something about the intimate nature of riding in a truck with someone for fourteen hours, and I remember getting back to my hotel room in Fairbanks after our trip and emailing my parents and my agent and saying, “This woman is the whole book.” I knew right away.
EB: I remember hearing Susan Orlean talk a couple years ago at the Cambridge Public Library, and she said her favorite way to interview someone is by sitting with them in the car, because sitting side by side, looking straight ahead, opens up space for more honest, candid conversations. Less intimidating than staring directly at someone across from a table with a tape recorder in the middle.
AB: That’s so interesting. I am going to start telling my students that in class now. I think we forget how important it can be sometimes just to make space for another person’s talking, their processing, their interaction with the world. But, yes, those conversations with Joy—I’d just been so moved by her, so awestruck, frankly. I’d expected her to talk about discrimination and abuse, working as she did as the nation’s only female big rig driver on the Dalton Highway, but instead she spoke about the stability and sense of purpose the profession provided her. I thought I was prepping to write a longer narrative about harassment, and on the contrary, this job is where she felt safest, most protected.
EB: After meeting Joy that first time, you knew that the whole book was going to be about her—but then she died tragically in a truck accident before you got to visit her again in Alaska. How did Joy’s death change the book you were planning to write?
AB: I didn’t know how to proceed for the longest time, frankly. At that point, I had already written the first hundred or so pages of the book, and we’d just sent it out to editors the week she died. One of the last exchanges I had with Joy was telling her that the book was out with editors and I was excited to see what would happen next. She was excited, too. And then she died, and we had to yank back the book proposal, and I knew I wanted to proceed but did not know how to.
EB: Oh, wow.
AB: I didn’t want the book to just be about her death, which is how so many stories get diverted. And I also didn’t want her death to feel in any way like a “gotcha” moment, which is why I lay the fact of her death right out from the beginning in an Author’s Note, before even page one—I didn’t want a reader to feel like it was a narrative trick. But Joy was also a woman who was deeply spiritual, who over the course of our time together told me that she believed her God had brought me to her to tell her story, and I wanted to honor both that truth as she saw it and the larger truths she hoped I’d share with others. As I revised the book proposal, I started to see connections to the abuse she was facing—both at home and throughout her lifetime—and what I was dealing with in my own relationship, and I realized that was the heart of the book. It was not just Joy’s story, despite my trying; it was the story of two women who were altogether different but tied very intimately through experience. I really believe that if we’re going to examine and share the stories of others, we need to be equally comfortable examining and sharing our own stories.
EB: Did you ever feel you couldn’t write the book anymore because Joy wasn’t alive?
AB: Nearly the entire time. Because she could no longer consent. Joy had confided in me about the intimate partner violence she had experienced in her lifetime, and I knew how important it was to her to demonstrate where so much of her strength came from. It was strength of necessity. Joy knew I was writing about the violence that women so commonly experience and what it means to be a woman in this nation more broadly, but when I’d asked how we’d handle the act of me writing about her second husband, who she was still married to at the time, she said, “We’ll deal with that when the time comes.” And then she died. So I really grappled with what to do, being especially cognizant of the fact that she has three children. Her daughter lost her mother, and I didn’t want anything I wrote to jeopardize her relationship with her remaining parent. But I also believe Joy made room for complication throughout her life, and her love and sense of hope was persistent, and that felt important for me to share. That weighs heavily on me, still—protecting those children and protecting their image of their mother—but what I come back to again and again is my obligation to Joy and sharing the story she told me. So much of writing in this genre is about navigating relationships and weighing the ethics of what you’re doing. It’s never easy. It’s always tricky.
EB: How and when did you decide to weave in your own personal story of abuse alongside Joy’s story? What it her death that really pushed you to do that? And how did you balance tying your two stories together?
AB: For the longest time, I was not a part of this book. Why would I be? It was about strong women, about women who led courageous lives. It wasn’t until I was sitting in the truck next to Joy, confiding in her about my relationship, that I even came to the word “abuse.” I’ve been watching Maid on Netflix these past few days, which is based on Stephanie Land’s gripping memoir, and at one point, the main character’s partner screams at her and punches a wall, but she struggles to use the word “abuse” or “domestic violence” to describe what happened because he didn’t actively hit her. That was very true for me, too, in the sense that I went up to Alaska to escape what was going on at home, and only in explaining to Joy what was going on, and having her share her experiences with me, did I understand that this was abuse, that it need not reach that hierarchical fever-pitch we so associate with partner violence. His words and physical intimidation were abusive. And Joy insisted this is how abuse functions: abuse escalates.
It wasn’t until Joy and I started talking about how necessary it was for me to leave—and this was the last conversation she and I had in person—that I began to understand the importance of my own narrative set alongside hers. It felt incredibly powerful to have someone who had so little investment in my life—and who wasn’t a close friend or family member—look at me and see what was happening and say so, very plainly. That was the moment I realized what I was actually dealing with, and I think that was the moment I realized why I had been so interested in Joy in the first place.
I had no idea about her experiences with abuse at home, and only later did I learn that the reason she drove this truck, in this incredibly deadly terrain, was because it was the way to provide for and support herself and her daughter in case she needed to leave her marriage. But I think something about that why was pulling me to her. Hearing this gave me permission to write the story I was experiencing, and it also allowed me to fill in some gaps surrounding Joy in the storyline, because she was suddenly no longer there to answer my questions.
EB: I love what you said about how we can be subconsciously drawn to our subjects—so often I start writing about something and don’t know why I am interested in it, and then only after a lot of writing does it hit me, oh, that’s what this is really about.
Now, compared to your first book, Visiting Hours, how was your writing and research process similar or different with Mothertrucker?
AB: I felt really proud of my first book when I wrote it. And I still feel that I did the best that I could with that book when I wrote it, but I wrote it when I was 23-25. The book is about my friendship with a close college friend, Kevin, who walked me home one evening, said goodnight to me, made sure I got in safe, and then went home and experienced a psychotic break and murdered his ex-girlfriend. Looking back on that now, I think I was too close to the event—only three years out from it—and I lacked some of the critical awareness and context to do that story justice.
EB: That reminds me a lot of what Eula Biss has said ten years after the publication of her essay collection Notes from No Man’s Land—that she was a very different person, a younger, less knowledgeable person, writing at a different time.
AB: Yes. I relate to that. A close friend recently finished reading Mothertrucker and told me that my evolution as a writer was overwhelming from one book to the next, and I think—honestly?— that was the nicest compliment anyone could’ve offered me, because once again I’m working with a topic that is incredibly sensitive and ethically complicated and I was so nervous I’d get it wrong, or be too close, or lack that critical thinking so much hinges upon.
At 23, there were a lot of ways in which I was unwilling or unable, frankly, to look at the fact that this young woman, Emily Silverstein, that my friend killed was his on- and off-again girlfriend. My understanding was that they had broken up, so it wasn’t an example of intimate partner violence, which is both true (mental health evaluations determined he had never intended to hurt her, only himself) and very, very untrue (he called her and she came to him because she’d loved him). In writing Mothertrucker, it was so important to me to demonstrate a far more nuanced understanding of how violence against women and intimate partner violence works. I think I did the best job that I could do with Visiting Hours, but I am also glad to have a new book out, because it feels much more representative of who I am now as a writer and woman.
EB: I love that you are also a writing professor. How do you think teaching has influenced your writing?
AB: I teach and direct the writing program at a small private liberals arts school, Ohio Wesleyan University, and like most faculty, I wear a lot of different hats, which means I get to teach literature seminars and creative writing workshops. My favorite literature class to teach is one I designed, called Contemporary Feminist Literature, where I try to only teach things that have been published or produced or otherwise curated at some point in the past five years. No “The Yellow Wallpaper,” though of course I love it. Instead we’re looking at personal essays from the mothers behind the Black Lives Matter movement, watching TED Talks about female sexuality and shame by Monica Lewinsky, and reading excerpted memoirs by some of the nations’ leading trans and non-binary authors. I like getting to design classes around what I’m interested in because that energy translates—immediately—into the classroom. And that class helped prepare me for Mothertrucker.
I also teach a class on longform narrative nonfiction magazine feature writing, and putting together that curriculum made me rethink what I consider an essay to be. I’ve been calling Mothertrucker a book-length essay, because it’s not strictly a profile or a memoir, and its structure is largely the product of reverse-engineering so many of the feature essays I assign and teach in that class.
EB: Like Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief! Sorry I keep bringing up Susan Orlean. She is just so great. And that time she was drunk on Twitter—she is a goddess.
AB: [laughter]
EB: Feel free to speak about writing Mothertrucker in particular or writing nonfiction in general—but what do you think is the most challenging part of writing nonfiction? And what do you think is the most rewarding?
AB: Whoa.
EB: Sorry, that’s kind of a doozy of a question.
AB: A doozy but the most important one. I think the most challenging thing is what I already mentioned—the ethics behind it. Both of my books have been personal but have also examined the actions and behaviors of another person. You have to figure out how to draw the line for yourself, because only you can decide what feels right and ethical, and it looks different for every project.
And as for the rewarding part—I think it’s when I begin a new project and write a line or a sentence that feels true to me. Then everything else feels possible. Like when I wrote what was, for the longest time, the opening line of Mothertrucker—“The road to heaven is neon blue and paved only in places.”—I could feel the whole book then. I could feel Joy’s energy. It later got bumped to elsewhere in the book, but that line was the first flicker of knowing what was possible.
EB: Finally, what is a favorite passage of nonfiction by a fellow “non-man”?
AB: Amy Hempel is a fiction writer, but she has a short story in which writes about a friend who was dying, though the narrator didn’t know that. She describes how, in the last weeks of his life, he helped his friends do very ordinary things—he takes the narrator, for example, to a department store to pick out a new lamp—and she says, “I think he was tucking me in. He was making sure all of his friends had the right lamps, the comfiest pillows, the softest sheets. He was tucking us all in for the night.”
EB: Oh, wow. That’s such a good quote. I guess I can forgive that it is fiction.
AB: Hempel’s work has an essayistic quality to it, and maybe this is a good place to insert that while I write and read nonfiction, I think genre itself is kinda categorically dumb? An experience is an experience. And this line—it feels especially poignant because, with Joy gone, I look back and remember and it’s almost as if she knew she was leaving, and so she did all the things she knew needed doing to make sure everyone around her would be okay—seeing her son and his new wife in Hawaii, taking her daughter to France (their first time out of the country and their first trip alone together), and getting me to actually do something about my relationship and the very real danger she knew I was in. That’s how I like to think of it. Joy was tucking us all in.