MOTHERTRUCKER
by Amy Butcher
An acclaimed essay writer and memoirist tells the story of her life-changing meeting with a female Alaskan Artic ice road trucker.
Butcher first discovered Joy “Mothertrucker” Wiebe on Instagram, where she fell in love with her photos of the John W. Dalton highway, a road where “more drivers die…annually than anywhere else in our America.” But the connection to Mothertrucker ran deeper than images. Independent and fearless, she “had built her home in a place of unfathomable fear and danger, in a landscape dominated by men and machinery, in an industry and a remote terrain whose googling returns mostly photos of house-high snowdrifts and 18-wheelers crushed and crumpled like pieces of paper, as if God took them in his fist and squeezed.” A successful professor who had navigated a male-dominated professional world, Butcher nurtured a troubling secret: involvement with an abusive boyfriend named Dave. She contacted Mothertrucker after a particularly disturbing bout of verbal abuse and embarked on a six-day interview. Their connection was immediate despite their different backgrounds. Mothertrucker was a working-class Christian with an open, profoundly spiritual view of God. For Butcher, the concept of religion and church was more “complicated,” especially regarding Dave, who loved God and “tried to scream his faith into me.” During their treacherous drive from Fairbanks to Prudhoe Bay, Butcher and Mothertrucker discussed their lives, finding commonality in their experiences with love, bad relationships, and controlling men. A bad first marriage, at age 17, had taught Mothertrucker to value herself and her desires above what her husband wanted; listening to her, Butcher realized what she already knew: Her life was her own, and she could “choose happiness and safety [or] choose Dave.” A sobering reflection on verbal and psychological abuse, Butcher’s book honors the healing power of female friendship and questions the nature of divinity beyond its constricting patriarchal manifestations.
A searching and deeply empathetic memoir.