Born to Run: The American Road Trip Myth & Lauren Groff’s “The Wind”

In at least one of each of their greatest songs, “Fast Car” and “Born to Run,” both Tracy Chapman and Bruce Springsteen tapped into the one American myth that still carries astonishing vigor. Like other perceptive American writers and lyricists, they understood, in their bones, that America remains as disconnected as ever from its storied past. The story of America—or, more accurately, the competing stories of America, depending on whether they are told by someone who is subjugated, a subjugator, or someone who fits both roles—has never truly taken root, found sustenance, or found its footing.

But, when these stories clash and contradict each other at every turn, how can they? The “land of the free” is now moonlighting as the carceral state. The “home of the brave” is too afraid of the mishigas that might break out if its people were allowed control or protection of their own bodies. And the cult of the rugged individual has long since replaced its frontier chapel of nonconformity and individualism with a gilded cathedral of privatization, making it nearly impossible for the inner lives of Americans ever to feel truly connected to a shared American dream, if such a dream could ever be found. Yet in America, one myth persists out in the open: We are born to run.

I first learned of fiction writer Lauren Groff while revisiting a collection of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, and have since become enamored. In writing the introduction to that collection, Groff deftly balanced glowing admiration for O’Connor’s craftsmanship as a prose writer and storyteller with an honest acknowledgment of the biases O’Connor brought to her work. More recently, I came across Groff’s new short-story collection, Brawler, while killing time at the Center for Fiction in Downtown Brooklyn, waiting for my phone to be fixed. I opened the book to the first story and read the first sentence:

Pretend, the mother had said when she crept to her daughter’s room in the night, that tomorrow is just an ordinary day.

I didn’t need to read another word before heading to the counter to buy the book. Less than a week later, I had read all nine of its stories.

Brawler is  a monumental collection of short stories evoking the storytelling heft and truth-telling power you’d find in collections like Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard To Find and Other Stories or J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories. In fact, Groff’s characters in Brawler remind one of many of Salinger’s and O’Connor’s broken, searching characters.

For example, the coming-of-age story of the rich kid, Chip, in “What’s The Time, Mr. Wolf”—the longest story in this collection and its centerpiece—resembles the tragic, self-loathing arc of Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye. Groff, however, is less charitable to Chip than Salinger is to Holden, stretching Chip’s loneliness over a longer span and across multiple stages of his life, and resolving his story more bitterly. As Chip waits in the snowy underbrush, hoping for one last life-affirming revelation, Groff showcases one of her most effective tools as a writer: her ability to seamlessly shift the narrative gaze, moving from Chip’s perspective to that of the object of his yearning, Pearl Spang. Doing so reveals alternative truths too uncomfortable for the protagonist’s own eyes. (Groff uses this device so effectively in her novel Fates and Furies.)

One story from Brawler, “The Wind,” has lingered with me since I first read its opening sentence in the bookstore. Originally published in The New Yorker in 2021, it seems likely Groff was still working on it as she and those around her grappled with the new, disconcerting, and isolating dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was a time when we, as Americans, were getting in our cars and taking road trips—to the beach, upstate from the city, cross-country, or just driving around our neighborhoods—doing anything to break up the overly ordinary days we felt stuck in while confined by social distancing and obligatory mask-wearing. This interplay of the ordinary and the extraordinary, the private and the public, was—just like coronavirus—in the wind. And Groff, like all of us, was breathing it. Lucky for us, she exhaled one of the most haunting and devastatingly edifying American road-trip stories ever written.

“The Wind” begins with twelve-year-old Michelle leading her younger brothers, nine-year-old Joey and six-year-old Ralphie, away from their home, “so far in the country, the bus came for them first.” Following instructions their mother, Mama, confided to Michelle in the middle of the night, the three children get off the bus before it reaches their school so they can rendezvous with Mama, who is waiting for them in her old Dodge. They make a pit stop at her workplace to pick up her paycheck, then they’re on the road to Albany to catch a bus to a city that is never named. Mid-journey, Mama assuages her three children, saying there are “museums and parks and movie theaters and subways and everything,” where “there’ll be no more stupid sheep to take care of and it’ll be safe. No more having to run out to the barn to sleep,” and where there is “a life that will be so boring, every day it will be the same, and it is going to be wonderful. OK?”

There is a sinister breeze blowing throughout the story, like the big bad wolf that is always stalking the piggies and the sheep. It’s often lingering right outside the gates or behind the wall, sometimes breaking through, breaking ribs, bruising skin, smashing teeth, but always living inside the minds of its intended victims. It’s a tension that never resolves because it stems from an affliction so ugly and cruel that it becomes firmly embedded in Mama and her children—so much so, that it will be passed down for generations. 

It’s the other myth of America that has persisted, not out in the open but in its darkest corners and beneath its floorboards: that somehow the American survivors of violence and abuse are responsible for what they’ve endured—whether they are domestic partners, children, immigrants, or enslaved peoples. This misplaced sense of responsibility becomes ingrained, insidiously so, and for some American survivors, the guilt they carry is further reinforced by their belief that if the abuse they experienced was truly unbearable or life-threatening, they could have easily avoided it by choosing to go anywhere else in a free, open, and brave America.

To emphasize this lasting impact of violence and abuse, Groff chooses a narrator who is neither Mama nor her oldest child Michelle. Instead, it’s Michelle’s daughter, a third-generation survivor, who recounts the story Michelle shared with her about Michelle’s family’s ordeal from a generation ago. But Groff doesn’t reveal the narrator’s name. In this way, Michelle remains the fulcrum of the tale, and the reader is left with the sense that the unnamed daughter is inhabiting Michelle’s body.

Michelle’s trauma, from witnessing what happens to Mama in their home to experiencing the same brutality when she puts her body in front of Mama to defend her, transforms the twelve-year-old. She becomes the parent not only to her younger brothers but also to Mama. She’s now the beating heart of the family as they hit the road in hopes of reinventing their lives. Below, the narrator, Michelle’s daughter, recounts what her mother told her about that one moment many decades ago, when Michelle became aware of the gravity of her newfound responsibility.

And then [Mama] started breathing crazily, and leaned forward until her forehead rested on the wheel, and the car stopped in the middle of the road. The wind howled around it.

Mama, we need to drive, my mother said. We need to drive now. We need to go. […]

It’s OK, it’s OK, it’s OK, my grandmother whispered. It’s just that my body is not really listening to me. I can’t move anything right now. I can’t move my feet. Oh, god.

It’s fine, my mother said softly. Don’t worry. You’re fine. You can take the time you need to calm down.

And at this moment my mother [Michelle] saw with terrible clarity that everything depended upon her. The knowledge was heavy on the nape of her neck, like a hand pressing down hard.

This heavy weight, “like a hand pressing down hard,” is something renowned psychologist Alice Miller wrote extensively about in her 1979 bestseller, The Drama of the Gifted Child. According to Miller, early-life trauma often leads a child to adopt survival strategies that rely on repression and the self-denial of one’s own needs. One such strategy is for the child to reverse roles and become the parent. But in doing so, the child no longer has the capacity to focus on their own needs or to experience a normal childhood, much like the trade-off the body makes by entering a coma to conserve as much energy as possible to fight off a harrowing infection. This child grows up without learning how to fully feel. They remain disconnected from themselves and others and, unless there is some course correction or intervention, they eventually lead an empty, depressed life as an adult.

Throughout their lives, these parentified children withdraw from others (for safety’s sake!), becoming far more cautious and self-oriented, even perfectionistic. This personal privatization not only closes off their inner lives but also means those who develop this self-protection mechanism can’t help but pass it down to their own children. It’s a ripple effect we don’t talk about enough, and it’s one of the quieter ways the legacy of violence endures across generations. Groff’s narrator in “The Wind” captures this dynamic so poignantly when she describes how her mother Michelle’s experiences affect her own life:

But always inside my mother there would blow a silent wind, a wind that died and gusted again, raging throughout her life, touching every moment she lived after this one. She tried her best, but she couldn’t help filling me with this same wind. It seeped into me through her blood, through every bite of food she made for me, through every night she waited, shaking with fear, for me to come home by curfew, through every scolding, everything she forbade me to say or think or do or be, through all the ways she taught me to move as a woman in the world.

In her author’s note at the end of her collection, Groff shares that “this story lived in my body before I even had language, passed down from my mother and my mother’s mother. It was brought to the surface by a terrifying conversation with a stranger.” In a similar way, especially for me and the many others who can identify at least a little with what Michelle went through, the unassailable power of “The Wind” lies in its ability to dredge up the reasons we learned to be indifferent, why we “dark forest” ourselves away from the forces we fear can harm us, and why we view connection and openness as vices and as jeopardizing.

Groff is shining a spotlight on what mothers and their children have gone through, not just in America and in modern times, but in all parts of the world and throughout history. She is writing about “this wind” in women that is “passed down from a time beyond history…that is dark and ceaseless and raging within.” As a society, we are a very long way from carrying evenly the burden and pain of the consequences of generational violence. As a man, I can see that if I am part of this story, I am both a victim and an assailant. And there are, of course, other axes of unevenness. Non-white and non-heterosexual people, and those with disabilities have also been disproportionately exposed to the damage and worst outcomes of violence. Whether Groff intended it or not, her story here is not just about the wind blowing inside women but about what is blowing inside so many of us. 

And given how, in America, systems of violence and domination perpetuate the closing off of our personal lives, our disconnection from one another, and the overwhelming sense that safety is not evenly available, the very idea of a “melting pot of America” can now be seen for the ruse it is. Groff, together with other American creatives—such as songwriters Bruce Springsteen and Tracy Chapman, writers John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison, and new American writers looking at their country through an immigrant’s eyes, such as Elaine Castillo and Carlos Bulosan—also see this. They understand that to confront the very idea of America, you have to repurpose its myths. Or, at the very least, see clearly how the myths feed off one another. We are born to run, hit the road, get in a fast car, strive to be baptized (again and again), or do whatever it takes to move toward a blank slate or fresh start—all ways of forgetting who we are or where we come from—because we don’t yet possess the fortitude to reckon honestly with the uglier story of America that resides in its shadows. Or, for some, like the protagonists of “The Wind,” the circumstances are so dire that there is no choice but to move as far away from the wolf as possible, as quickly as possible.

Mama, Michelle, Joey, and Ralphie’s story has been living in my head for weeks now. I suspect it will stay with me much longer, rattling around, never settling. I am very thankful for some of the decisions Groff made in her storytelling, for example, never naming the wolf and matter-of-factly showing us, the readers, that the silence or inaction of others in their community is also an important part of the story. And although I truly wish otherwise, as I meditate on this story that won’t leave me, I keep coming to the same somber conclusion. Nothing will change, and we will continue to struggle to find a shared and safe story of America unless we publicly acknowledge and reckon with the horrible truth we, as Americans, work so hard to keep hidden and private. That we have not measured up to America’s promise—a promise impossible to keep because it was not written by us or for us and never honestly reflected how we want to see ourselves. That, as Americans, we have, for some time, felt deeply inadequate, rootless, desperate, and lonely as a result. And that, to compensate and make ourselves feel whole again, we have done terrible and violent things to one another.