JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
The most important character in any road trip story is the car. When Annie Hartnett was writing "The Road To Tender Hearts," that character was a white Prius. But when it came time to design the cover...
ANNIE HARTNETT: The art department didn't like it. They didn't like a white Prius on the cover. So they said, can it be a red Mustang? And I was like a very different type of character owns a red mustang than a white Prius. So I said here's the acceptable cars it could be and, sure, it can be red. And I was still editing the book. So I went back and I changed the whole character of the car.
SUMMERS: Hartnett's book, released last year, follows 67-year-old PJ Halliday, his estranged daughter and his newly adopted grandniece and nephew on an unexpected road trip to reunite with PJ's high school crush. The final cover shows the four travelers, an orange cat and the newly rewritten car - a red Volvo.
HARTNETT: We just finished the cover after I changed the car, and then that day, I saw People Magazine posted Kevin Wilson's new novel. So I opened it, and I was like, oh, my God. It's the same cover.
SUMMERS: Kevin Wilson's "Run For The Hills" is another road trip novel. It follows four half-siblings tracking down the father who abandoned them. Its cover features the four siblings, a chicken and a red PT Cruiser.
HARTNETT: I texted Kevin. I was like, I think they're going to move my date because I'm going to be the "Deep Impact" to your "Armageddon."
KEVIN WILSON: Two writers that have never made characters go anywhere, suddenly write road trip novels at the same time.
SUMMERS: With so many people hitting the road this summer, we reunited Hartnett and Wilson and asked them to share their favorite road trip books and memories.
HARTNETT: One book that I've read when I was writing "Tender Hearts" was "The Flying Troutmans" by Miriam Toews, and that is probably one of my favorite road trip books. It's about a woman, probably in her 30s, and her sister is in a mental hospital. And she ends up driving her niece and nephew across the country looking for their dad.
And then one of my favorite road trip stories is "Car Crash While Hitchhiking," and that is one of my favorites because - I have a pet peeve about people hitting animals on a road trip in a novel, but that is one where the animal is hit. Animals do die. But it does some beautiful work with the characters.
WILSON: I think, for me, it's not exactly a road trip novel, but it's what I predicated when I started to think about writing a road trip novel was Charles Portis' "True Grit." Mattie Ross hires Rooster Cogburn to head out into the unknown Western territories to get revenge for the murder of her father. And just the movement of that book and the kind of uneasy relationship between these two strangers - or three strangers - as they navigate that trip. Charles Portis also wrote "Dog of the South" and "Masters Of Atlantis." Like, he's just a master of the weirdness of being, like, conveyed and going to a new place. So I love that stuff.
And the other one I thought about was Imogen Binnie's "Nevada." And kind of what's so cool about that is it's a trans woman who's kind of completely upended and wrecked her life and steals her girlfriend's car and heads out West. And I think kind of what I love about it as a road trip novel is that the actual driving and stuff is kind of erased. Like, you just get to see, like, what sets it in motion and then the arrival and then the possibility of another road trip.
HARTNETT: People say that they don't like road trip books. And I thought about why that might be, and I do get it. And I think it's because you can't use minor characters in the same way that you can in other books, and you also can't like - place is hard 'cause you're moving from place to place. So every place has to make a big impression. Every character has to be very clear who they are in your first interaction with them. But then again, I think that that's the magic of road trips in real life is how quickly you can get an impression of a place, how many weird things and weird people you encounter if you do take a cross-country road trip.
WILSON: People that say they don't like them - I'm curious about that. 'Cause, I mean, I don't know if my characters really think of it as a road trip as much as they think of it - Mad keeps calling it a quest. And quests are things that people love, you know?
HARTNETT: Yeah.
WILSON: They love those kind of fantastical stories. So I try to think of it more like that, you know? And I think Annie's book is so amazing at finding major ways to upend that. Like, I have to say, like, one of my difficulties with road trips is I don't like conflict, and I don't like anything to happen. I just like, like, a frictionless movement across time and space. And my editor had to keep going, like, something needs to happen as they're driving. And I was like, oh, I don't have anything happen in my regular books. And it's like, well, it's not as noticeable 'cause they're in the same place forever. But if you're moving, there needs to be some, like, chaos. So I was like, oh, OK. I've learned something about writing.
HARTNETT: I mean, you can't have every stop fall into chaos or you'll never get where you're going. So I think writing a road trip, you got to think about the momentum of when are you really going to have the car break down? When are you going to have a gas leak in the hotel that they're staying in? When are things going to stop for a minute so the characters take stock, and when do you want them to get back on the road?
WILSON: I used to do these road trips all the time, and they were very short. But I had this friend in high school, Will Auba (ph), who had this crazy ability. He knew - if you said a state and a city, he could tell you the malls that were in that city. And we would go on road trips, just driving through, he'd be like, OK, we're going to go - in Hoover, Alabama, there's the Riverchase Galleria. It's three stories. It has an anchor store that's Parisian. It's got a JCPenney. And we would drive all over the place, walk through the entire mall. He would get a map of it for his collection, and we would drive for days just visiting shopping malls. Like, I have slept in the Hickory Hollow Mall parking lot overnight. It's just insane.
But those trips were so lovely 'cause Will was my friend. He always was my friend. But we could be removed from the world that we knew and all our other friends, and it was just the two of us in the car. And it wasn't that we were learning new things about each other. It was that we realized we could be comfortable anywhere with each other. And I don't know. Those were so special to me.
HARTNETT: Road trips, especially with children, or any time in a car with children is how you actually get to know even your own child. So I have a 7-year-old daughter, and really the only time she talks to me in any depth is when we're in the car driving to and from school. And that is kind of where kids feel safe because they've spent a lot of time in the car. It's predictable. It's boring. So I do think that the claustrophobia of the car allows people to talk to each other and get to know each other in a safe way.
WILSON: For me, road trips are rarely about, like, the destination necessarily. It's more just like - when you live in a really tiny town and you feel weird inside your own body, there is something really reassuring to realize, like, how big the world is and that your body can travel through all those spaces, you know? And you can take on - like, this is how I fit into this place temporarily. I think it's reassuring. But for me, it's always - it's predicated on the notion that you're going back, that you're returning to that place where you are from.
SUMMERS: That was Kevin Wilson, author of "Run For The Hills," and Annie Hartnett, author of "The Road To Tender Hearts."
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