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: Memoir, Nonfiction

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.

[sanni · Rating 4 out of 5]

i’ve been spending my first chicago summer (and first summer back in the midwest in years) feeling kind of restless. i feel busy all the time even though when i look back at how i’ve spent my time and ask myself what i’ve really done the answer is “nothing”. and i feel completely constrained by the boundaries of my life even though i have like no responsibilities other than like working. i think the thing is i do just want to say fuck it and be chaotic and go apeshit but i don’t know where to find the time.

anyway i’ve been really craving that specific feeling of having a long languorous summer where you really have no plans no obligations no nothing and you just let your legs carry you somewhere and that’s where you are. reading this book in that state of mind felt really really satisfying. maybe the only thing stopping me from getting in my car and driving to wisconsin whenever i want and stopping wherever i want for as long as i want is myself i dont know.

i thought the book was really well-researched too. wisconsin is one of my fav places on earth if not my actual favorite and reading about these far flung pockets of it and their histories and the people who live there felt really special and added so much texture to even my own understanding of it. like oh these places that always existed to me as names on road signs on my way to and from madison are kind of living breathing places too. that is pretty neat.

i will say i don’t know how well i felt the essays worked together as a collection. i think they were pretty clearly published elsewhere first and then pulled together for this book. there were a few themes (the feeling of being a bad person, the sense that reality is coming apart at the seams) that came up a few times and never really went anywhere deeper. i feel like if i was reading these essays as they were written i would find it interesting to track garvey’s attitudes towards these things over her body of work but here it ended up feeling a little repetitive without really enriching the essays in a meaningful way.

last thing i’ll say is that i saved this book to start reading during a road trip to madeline island in the apostle islands and started reading it the morning after visiting tom’s burned down cafe so seeing that the introduction is about that place i was like holy shittttttttttt

[aly · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

[Amelia · Rating 5 out of 5]

made me remember the electricity in the atmosphere before a summer storm over the wide open spaces of the midwest

[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.

[Rob Harvilla · Rating 5 out of 5]

My closest brush with murder—I mean, with being murdered—had happened here in the Northwoods several years before. A few months of the COVID-19 pandemic had rendered me insane, resulting in a brief, though perhaps not brief enough, romance with a man I'd met at a bonfire that summer on shrooms. At a glance, he appeared to be the picture of normality: He drove a big truck, lived out in the country, and worked at a printing press just like my dad. Date enough artists and you get to thinking that regular Joes are the ticket to love.

Well, bad news! Sometimes while drinking, his eyes would turn black and he'd say that my kitchen was swarming with demons. And when it came to demons, it was not his first rendevous. He claimed to have once performed an exorcism on his baby mama on a cold winter night in his father's barn. I reckon methamphetamines were involved as they so often are in cases of demonic possession.

But no one wanted to party on that sad New Year's Eve, leaving me with nothing better to do than accompany my lover to a cabin seven hours away for a cozy Northwoods weekend, or so I fooled myself. It was lovely there in Hayward, all blanketed in snow, the little red pine cabin on the edge of Devil's Lake lit festively by Tiffany lamps and a cracking fire. Cocaine before dinnertime was where the trouble began, and by the time we reached the Tally Ho Supper Club, the mood was touch and go. "You are in your 30s, unmarried, with no children," he remarked offhandedly as our prime ribs arrived. "Are you aware that your life holds no real meaning?" The Czar of Family Values lost custody of his daughter and had recently taken PCP for 30 consecutive days, but the comment stung nevertheless.

"Did I hear that there's a birthday in the house" cried our waiter, presenting me with a flaming slice of chocolate lava cake. I held a smile as the room sang "Happy Birthday," a tradition I've considered a humiliation ritual for about as long as I've been alive to hear it. "Are we allowed to sing this year?" my mother had asked me gently in a grainy home video taken on my second birthday; I solemnly declined, the mere suggestion of the song having sent me into hysterical tears the year before. She laughed as she forbade the room from singing in a voice that sounds like love. Now I was 32,. the same age she was then, spending my birthday with a man who appeared to want me dead.

We drove in silence through the snow back to the cabin, where, by the glow of the wood-burning stove, my love proposed drowning me in the frozen lake out back. At some point in the drive, he had apparently decided that I was possessed by Satan himself. I assessed the situation. It was too cold to make a run for it, and so I offered him some molly. This plan worked for some time.

I counted down the minutes on the drive back to Chicago, listening to the same John Prine song over and over again. It was about a double murder by the Illinois-Wisconsin border, but it sounded strangely tender, and somehow the music tricked us into being in love again.

"In the parking lot by the forest preserve," Prine sang, or sort of rambled, "the police had found two bodies—nay, naked bodies! / Their faces had been horribly disfigured by some sharp object / Saw it on the news, the TV news, in a black-and-white video / You know what blood looks like in a black-and-white video?"

"Shadows!" we shouted to the dusky interstate. SHADOWWWS!

We stopped for cheese curds and ButterBurgers at the world's largest Culver's, and for a moment there, I thought maybe things would be alright. But then the spell broke and I hated him. We never spoke again.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most of the places Garvey is writing about are nearly equidistant to my home and hers; the differences between us are not as important as this plain fact that I could get in my car and drive to many of the places that she details in this book, just as she did. These drives (most of them through Wisconsin) are beautiful. There's a reason why Wisconsin is basically the Vermont of the Midwest for Chicagoans (the NYC-ers of the Midwest).
She is sometimes a little cagey about what she did and didn't do in this book, and that's good and proper, but the structure and tone of narrative varies so wildly that the protaganist's (her?) alcoholism and drug addiction feels believable, like the book itself is more diary than travelogue. The place where this becomes problematic is in the middle of the book, when the genre shifts from travelogue to memoir and she describes in fairly boring detail the story of a burnout chanteuse from the early 20th century. Garvey may feel a lot of sympathy towards this person, but this is why soyez réglé dans votre vie et ordinaire comme un bourgeois, afin d’être violent et original dans vos oeuvres. She is mistaking some of the descriptions of hitting bottom on her addictions with something violent and original, when in fact the best part of this book is the way that she's able to create a kind of hidden and revealed self through the travelogues. When the rhythm of the piece was interrupted in the middle, I couldn't get back into the book as a whole, even though the second half has some sections (especially in the Upper Peninsula) that are just as good as the first few chapters.
Ultimately Garvey is really talented and I'll read what she makes next, and I'll definitely keep reading her Substack.

[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 · 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.

[Nicole · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don’t know why this book exists. Good memoirs from otherwise unknown people transform an ordinary life into something larger through insight or a voice that makes experiences feel viscerally familiar or newly understood. This book never makes that leap.

Instead, it reads more like a diary. The pages are filled with recollections, local history, and anecdotes about life in the Midwest, but they’re presented as just a series of events, far short of a narrative. These events accumulate without building toward a deeper understanding of the author or the world around her. Half the book is just these winding detours into quotes from Charles Dickens, Twin Peaks, or whoever or whatever else, mixed with overdone bits of local lore.

There’s nothing inherently uninteresting about living an ordinary life. You don’t have to be famous or to have done something extraordinary to write a memoir worth reading. But if your life is ordinary, the storytelling can’t be. The events themselves matter less than the emotional honesty and narrative you build around them, and the insight the reader takes away. The best memoirs uncover something universal about the human experience. This one left me feeling like I’d read a few pages from someone’s high school journal spliced together with a travel blog. Albeit, a well-written journal. (She can put a sentence together).

If I learned anything in this self-described “coming of age memoir” (are you still coming of age if you’re nearing 40?), it’s that the author is trying so hard to be something she is not. She seems intent on positioning herself as an outsider, while describing a privileged upbringing, elite educational opportunities, and the freedom to walk away from them both. Rather than interrogating her incredible privilege, (or her emotional underdevelopment and avoidance) the memoir seems to romanticize an edgy, alienated persona without much self-awareness. She seems convinced she’s resisting clichés when she’s mostly trading one predictable set for another. The privileged, rich suburban girl reinvented as the tattooed, art-school, self-destructive outsider isn’t a novel character. (Though it might’ve been interesting or cool to me when I was in the 8th grade).

This book just doesn’t do what it said it set out to do, and I have no idea why it was worth writing—or reading.

[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.

[Nancy · Rating 4 out of 5]

These essays take the reader on a wild and fascinating road trip through the upper Midwest. Garvey examines the area's history, current communities, and talks to the people frequenting the local restaurants and bars. At the same time, she takes an unflinching look at her own past and present; her grief over her mother's death, past relationships, and her use of drugs and alcohol. The result is a dream-like, peculiar, often dark and yet humorous glimpse into the complexities of life in the Midwest and beyond from an incredibly talented writer.

[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.

[Douglas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably the best non-fiction book I’ll read in 2026. It’s a spiritually true memoir of a rootless life and a travel guide to the back roads of the Upper Midwest — with a few myths and legends sprinkled in for zest.
This is a book for readers who enjoy the scratchy sound dead leaves make as the wind pushes them down the sidewalk. This also is a book for anybody for feels like one of those dead leaves.

[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.”

[Cheyenne McCoy · Rating 5 out of 5]

“never take life advice from people who hate life”

read this on a road trip and loved it! kept me company on the side of the interstate while waiting for roadside assistance for 5 hours.

only a cool girl like meaghan garvey could make me devour a nonfiction book. i didn’t expect to ever be excitedly planning a trip to wisconsin, but here we are…

[Nicholas Rea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Succeeds at capturing something you can only call "Midwestern." Suffers from Substack-style citations, quotations, and needless digressions, but that's just my personal taste. Really sings when Garvey tries to just document what she sees around her, and especially when she's wonderfully cagey about what, exactly, she is doing in these places and why.

[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.

[Tiger Mom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting. A good writer, dark humor. Set in midwestern dive bars with alcoholics of all ages populating the pages. Garvey tells their stories as she slowly tours the Midwest , sharing historical anecdotes and drinking way too much. The book has its charms and also it is vaguely depressing.

[Riley Katz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is so many different things: memoir, historical record, road trip diary and gonzo journalism. But it somehow blends everything together into the high I’ve been searching for since reading Hunter Thompson while also being unlike anything else I’ve read.

[Lizz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Delightful. Dry, beautiful, silly, curious. A lot of drinking and bar scenes, but somehow that is a lot more interesting than I'd expect.

Some very funny Midwestern-isms that I immediately recognized in my Michigander partner's family

[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.”

[ursula · Rating 5 out of 5]

a beautiful or sad ode

i read most of it on a saturday morning and drank a miller immediately after

[caro · Rating 5 out of 5]

my most anticipated book of the year and it was perfect

[Jake Webb · Rating 5 out of 5]

loved this as someone born and raised in ‘da region’. also if you enjoyed the book subscribe to meaghan’s substack