The true story of two women who found meaning, strength, and friendship in one of the most punishing and magnificent landscapes on earth. Amy Butcher was an accomplished college professor, mentor, and writer, but in her own home, she was embarrassed and emotionally burdened by an increasingly abusive relationship. Exhausted and terrified of the ways her partner’s behavior could escalate, Amy reached out to Instagram celebrity Joy “Mothertrucker” Wiebe. Joy was a fifty-year-old wife and mother and the nation’s only female ice road trucker, a woman who maneuvered big rigs through the Alaskan wilderness along the deadliest road in America. Joy was everything Amy wanted to be: independent, fearless, and in charge of her life in a landscape dominated by men. Invited by Joy to ride shotgun, Amy found her escape on a road that was treacherous, beautiful, and exhilarating―an adventurous ride through the Alaskan wilderness that was profoundly life changing. Mothertrucker is the story of that bracing four-hundred-mile journey navigating snow-glazed overpasses, ice-blue curves, and near plummets. It’s also the stories that led them both to Alaska―an interrogation of the reality of female fear, domestic violence, and how to overcome―and an exploration into just how galvanizing friendships between women can be. “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.” — Kirkus Reviews “In this tender and gripping tale, essayist Butcher ( Visiting Hours ) recounts her unlikely adventure through Alaska with the country’s only female ice trucker, the late Joy “Mothertrucker” Wiebe…Along the way, Butcher explores myriad issues with nuance and grace, including Indigenous rights, violence against women, religious hypocrisy, and environmental concerns. It’s a trip readers won’t soon forget.” — Publishers Weekly “[Butcher] brings the details to vivid life as she describes both the brutally beautiful landscape and the many people she and Joy met on their brief journey together. A moving account of the impact of connection between women.” — Booklist “It’s through the context of Butcher’s and Wiebe’s shared experiences—and their attempts at sharing what they’ve gone through with each other—that Alaska truly enters the fabric of the text…This works well. The way Alaska (and land, in general) is often portrayed in books is as a feminine force: a place that offers refuge, that provides, and that consoles…This book is the journey of Butcher’s seeing Alaska as she is journeying to revise her imaginings of people—real, imperfect, frustrating, beautiful.” — Daily Sitka Sentinel “Butcher’s Mothertrucker takes a nuanced look at the stories of women—specifically her’s and Wieibe’s—to understand the complexities of relationships with intimate partner violence.” — Chicago Review of Books “A tribute to the power of female friendship to get us through anything, including domestic abuse, Mothertrucker is a compelling story of a professor, Amy, who seeks out an Instagram celebrity ice driver, and rides shotgun on an unforgettable, 400-mile trip through Alaska.” — Good Morning America “Ms. Butcher finds a way to make her story as much about the crisscross knot that is America today as it is about her and Joy, their short time together, and those men whom women love and too often fear…it is shot through with poignant insights about that extraordinary place and the extraordinary woman who drew her there. By listening so well to that landscape and to her plucky companion, Ms. Butcher indeed finds untapped reserves of self-reliance, and finally the power to reinvent herself. She also tells a rattling good story.” — The Wall Street Journal “[A] master class in the power of brutally honest writing.” — Washington Independent Review of Books “No one can argue that she is not an honest and brave writer. She also is adept at blending and finding correlations in her story and that of Joy. Butcher’s prose is clear, well-composed and often appealingly humorous, especially when describing her adventures on the road with Joy.” — The Columbus Dispatch “Amy Butcher’s Mothertrucker is a riveting book, a dynamic portrait of an extraordinary woman—a long-haul trucker, a mother, a survivor—whose company carries us into even broader explorations of friendship, trauma, renewal, and the collision of many kinds of precarity: environmental, economic, and emotional. Butcher’s voice is tender, curious, adamant, grateful, and always, always searching for a more complicated version of the truth.” —Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams and The Recovering “ Mothertrucker is an unputdownable page-turner, the kind that asks you to listen more closely, behold each beauty, perceive every flicker of buoyancy or trepidation. This book is an adventure into the expanse o