Amie Barrodale, Trip with Rainy Day Books

This event takes place in Unity Temple's Hall (downstairs) and includes a conversation between Amie and Clancy as well as an opportunity to get your book signed and personalized.

“Raw and funny, yet graceful and astonishingly precise, Trip is a book with the power to resonate in the most intimate ways for any reader. I read it in awe, as if Barrodale had written it just for me.” —Ottessa Moshfegh, author of Lapvona and My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Trip

A woman embarks on an odyssey through the afterlife to help her son, who is literally and figuratively lost at sea: a hilarious and deeply moving voyage of the body and the mind.

Sandra dies suddenly at a death conference in Nepal attended by academics and mystics. Days later, back in America, her teenage son, Trip, runs away with a man who picks him up on the side of a road. Sandra tries to get a message back to Trip through the mystics, but the mystics are distracted, and her son and the strange man set out to sea.

Amie Barrodale’s first novel features restless souls, Buddhist deities, divorcees in recovery programs, arguing academics, uncomprehending school principals, and treatment centers for troubled teenagers. It journeys from body to body, through life and death and back again. It tells the story of a mother and son who find other people hard to understand and who are themselves misunderstood. Guiding this wild, unpredictable journey is deep devotion: the desire to save a child and to be a good mother despite it all.

Wide-eyed with wonder, blazingly funny and achingly moving, Trip brings us the deeper meaning of The Tibetan Book of the Dead: the past is a memory, the future is a projection, the present is gone before we can see it.

Amie Barrodale’s stories and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s Magazine, and other publications. In 2012 she was awarded The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for Fiction for her story “William Wei.” She is the author of You Are Having a Good Time: Stories.

Clancy Martin is author of more than a dozen books and is University of Missouri Curators’ Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at UMKC. His most recent book, How Not to K*ll Yourself, was a Kirkus Prize finalist. He won the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Thomas Jefferson Award, and many others. He is married to the writer Amie Barrodale, has five children, six cats, and lives in midtown, Kansas City MO.

Host or Publisher Rainy Day Books