Overview

Joy Rides through the Tunnel of Grief is a fresh and ferocious memoir-in-essays that maps the boundaries of love, language, and creative urgency. When Nelson’s father dies from an accident caused by complications from alcoholism, she knows immediately she has inherited his love—that it left his body, traveled through the air, and entered her own. And so, she needs a place to put it. She needs to know what to do with it, how not to waste it, how to make something with it, how to honor it and put language to it. So, she places it with her brother, Eric, whose opioid addiction makes his death feel always imminent. With her partner, Jack, together for fifteen years. With her exhausted, grieving mother, her best friend Jessie, women at the gym she’s never had the courage to speak to, but loves completely. But mostly, she places it with her future child, the one she does not yet have but deeply wants. The child who is both the question of love—and the answer to it. So, when Jack suddenly confesses that he does not want to have children—not with her, not ever—the someday vessel for her boundless and insatiable love hunger swiftly disappears, taking with it a fundamental promise of her life: motherhood. Joy Rides through the Tunnel of Grief catalyzes from this place. Fluidly navigating through past, present, and future, Nelson asks: Where does her desire to have a child come from? How does wonder charge and change a life? Are the imperatives to make art and to make a child born from the same searching place? Are they both masked and misguided attempts to thwart death? Nelson investigates the tremulous makings and unmakings of our most intense and fragile bonds—family, friends, lovers—with searing insight, humor, and tenderness.

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9780820365473

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Reviews

Jessica Hendry Nelson's Joy Rides Through the Tunnel of Grief is a memoir of 'contradictory truths'--where a father is dead and alive all at once, where the past is as present as the word now in a world 'so full of love and longing and wonder and grief and fear.' It is an elegy. It is a love song. It is a cry to women to renew their bonds with one another. It is a sister's lament, and it is a dirge for a marriage gone under. It is also a book-length braided meditation on the act of creation itself--from the creation of life to the creation of story.--Brian Turner author of My Life as a Foreign Country

Jessica Hendry Nelson’s Joy Rides Through the Tunnel of Grief is a memoir of 'contradictory truths'—where a father is dead and alive all at once, where the past is as present as the word now in a world 'so full of love and longing and wonder and grief and fear.' It is an elegy. It is a love song. It is a cry to women to renew their bonds with one another. It is a sister’s lament, and it is a dirge for a marriage gone under. It is also a book-length braided meditation on the act of creation itself—from the creation of life to the creation of story."" - Brian Turner author of My Life as a Foreign Country

"Jessica Hendry Nelson’s Joy Rides Through the Tunnel of Grief is a memoir of 'contradictory truths'—where a father is dead and alive all at once, where the past is as present as the word now in a world 'so full of love and longing and wonder and grief and fear.' It is an elegy. It is a love song. It is a cry to women to renew their bonds with one another. It is a sister’s lament, and it is a dirge for a marriage gone under. It is also a book-length braided meditation on the act of creation itself—from the creation of life to the creation of story."" - Brian Turner author of My Life as a Foreign Country"

"Jessica Hendry Nelson's Joy Rides Through the Tunnel of Grief is a memoir of 'contradictory truths'--where a father is dead and alive all at once, where the past is as present as the word now in a world 'so full of love and longing and wonder and grief and fear.' It is an elegy. It is a love song. It is a cry to women to renew their bonds with one another. It is a sister's lament, and it is a dirge for a marriage gone under. It is also a book-length braided meditation on the act of creation itself--from the creation of life to the creation of story.--Brian Turner ""author of My Life as a Foreign Country"""

Author Information

Jessica Hendry Nelson is the author of the memoir If Only You People Could Follow Directions and coauthor (with Sean Prentiss) of the textbook and anthology Advanced Creative Nonfiction: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology . Her work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, North American Review, Tin House, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, The Carolina Quarterly, Columbia Journal, Painted Bride Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, PANK, Drunken Boat and elsewhere. She is assistant professor in the MFA program and English Department at Virginia Commonwealth University and on faculty in the MFA Program at the University of Nebraska in Omaha. She lives in Richmond, Virginia.

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