Midwestern Death Trip

by Meaghan Garvey

Meaghan Garvey's Midwestern Death Trip is part memoir, part gonzo reportage, in which the great American road trip meets an unsparing coming-of-age story. Estranged in the most misunderstood part of the country, Garvey navigates her blood-red Cadillac around the Midwest to chronicle her itinerant personal life amid a landscape of forgotten ghosts and backwoods bar tops.

Chicago writer Meaghan Garvey has made her bones as one of America's funniest and most astute music critics in her profiles and essays for The New York Times, Billboard, New York Magazine, County Highway, Pitchfork, and GQ . Meanwhile, her dark, unsparing, and wildly popular substack Scary Cool Sad Goodbye chronicles an itinerant personal life that reads like Thelma and Louise written by a female Hunter Thompson.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir

Paperback

Published May 12, 2026

Reviews

[Xani · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am fairly certain she would eschew any “voice of her generation”-esque superlatives, but it simply won’t stop me from insisting that Midwestern Death Trip has its finger on a cacklingly dry and astutely drunk pulse. Reading it made me feel like I was in on a secret I hadn’t expected to be so goopy. It has also activated in me a new impulse to ask What Would Meaghan Garvey Do? at all times (the answer is, almost always: another bump)

[Kathryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

In an era where well-researched and beautifully-written journalism is particularly hard to find, this book is so refreshing. Garvey's curiosity and unwillingness to settle for half-truths is so clear, and even further illuminated by her thoughtfully lyrical writing. Midwestern Death Trip is the best piece of non-fiction writing I've read in a very long time. A new favorite.

[aly · Rating 5 out of 5]

read the newsletter since the start and this book is such a perfect culmination

[Alexa Schlosser · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved everything about this book!

[Thom · Rating 5 out of 5]

A meandering, beer-soaked wade through the backwoods bars of the American Midwest. Equal parts memoir, travelogue and historical guidebook, Garvey accomplishes so much in this slim book which I finished over the weekend. kept my phone close as I read so i could flag half of the bars and supper clubs on Google Maps in the off-chance that I find myself cruising the driftless in a shitbox, hungover and hungry for walleye.

[Maddy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a wonderful glimpse into the heart of the upper Midwest. The author does a great job of presenting the personalities she encounters as they are, allowing the reader to feel the raw humanity in these pages. This book has made me feel homesick in a way I haven't in a long time, especially since I've either lived in or been to some of the places she passes through on her journey. The true third space of the Midwest is the local bar, and this author uses that to her advantage. I could feel the wood-paneled walls, sticky countertops, and taxidermied deer watching me as I read... a blue haze filling the air. Though I've left Wisconsin behind, I am still a Wisconsinite to my core. Overall, I am very glad I took a chance on this book. Somehow, having the heart of the Midwest documented like this - even if most may consider it quite dull - makes me proud of my heritage.

[Jake Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 2015 I read Meaghan’s review of Young Thug’s Barter 6 and was impressed with her style and how she wrote in a way that so wholly understood the idiosyncrasies of Thug especially when very few people were fucking with him at that time. I was immediately a fan.

A decade later after reading Midwestern Death Trip I am not at all surprised by how great it is. The small towns and forgotten places, and people, in these stories are written about in a way that is not judgemental and (literally) meets them where they’re at. I think that is really cool and severely missed in a lot of writing these days.

[Tyler Abbott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful read, the midwestern evangelist and new age journalist, Meaghan Garvey, not only peels back the wrappings on the oft overlooked America of the Midwest, but also on events of her own will-be-lived life. I appreciated both telling. As someone who is also trying to find the current life force of the American dream, I’ve loved how she documents her search, one bar at a time, through this book and her blog. I’m a current and future fan of Garvey and her work. Please, anyone, comment on other works that compare or are in this same vein of Midwestern Death Trip.

[Amanda Monthei · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was delighted to have stumbled on Meaghan’s Substack essay from a visit she took to my hometown (Indian River, MI, home of Alvis and the 55-foot crucifix) last summer, and was even more delighted to find that every essay in her book was similarly entertaining.

If you want to feel like you’re sitting in a red leather supper club booth, surrounded by wood paneling and taxidermied fish, eating a fried perch dinner served by a waitress named Tammy—well then this is your book.

[Danielle Chelosky · Rating 5 out of 5]

funny, insightful, vivid, earnest, erudite, quite literally an adventure. the weaving together of history & the present is so masterfully seamless, as is the ricocheting between the cultural & the personal. at the core of this book is an insatiable curiosity and openness that’s hard to come across these days.

[Spencer · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I’d meant to stop for only one drink, but that was never how it went. The way it got your hopes up, one drink was worse than none at all. Time got mixed up in bars like these, where it was hard to tell the difference between yesterday and tomorrow. In the dark room like a train car, we went nowhere together, waiting for something to happen. And usually it did.”

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

As someone who largely avoids getting himself into situations, I was taken by how many situations Meaghan seems to find herself in, between loving portraits of life in the rural midwest. A delightful read that makes you feel like you slid up to the local bar and just listened for a while (which to be fair, is by and large what she does). Highly recommend

[Jordan Tirico · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a debut — the barfly eccentricities of the place I love so beautifully regaled by an author that writes with a scabbed curiosity befitting of the region and its people. I want this vision of the Midwest imprinted onto my psyche. I could read so much more of this. 5

[Bill Ellingboe · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're from this region, you'll read about faces and places that are adjacent to your experience, depicted with care, humor, and sometimes affection.

I can imagine pictures of these folks incorporated into the book as Volume 2 of Wisconsin Death Trip. Fascinating.

[L · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn’t want it to end. It’s been years since I’ve read nonfiction as electric as Garvey’s. The supper club descriptions had me nostalgic for something I’ve never even known before.

[Devlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I’d meant to stop for only one drink, but that was never how it went. The way it got your hopes up, one drink was worse than none at all.”