I love a good road trip. There’s something about it that loosens the mind a bit. Long stretches of highway invite reflection, memories surface unexpectedly, and conversations with strangers somehow feel easier and more meaningful than they do in ordinary life.
Maybe it’s because the rules of everyday life are temporarily suspended. You exist in a liminal space between destinations, and for a little while, you become more open to surprise.
Welcome to this week’s installment of Likely Stories on KWBU. I’m Gia Chevis, and I’m recommending E.A. Hanks’s memoir, The 10.
Hanks—yes, the daughter of Tom Hanks—sets out to drive Interstate 10 across the country while trying to better understand both her late mother and herself.
She approaches the trip like many of us approach difficult parts of our lives: hoping that if she digs deeply enough, asks enough questions, retraces enough old ground, she might finally uncover the missing explanation that makes everything make sense. But of course, life is frustratingly resistant to tidy narratives.
One of the ideas I found most compelling in the book is the distinction between truth and narrative. We crave stories with clear beginnings and endings, moments of revelation, lessons learned. We want to point to a single event and say, “Ah ha! That’s why everything happened the way it did.” But embodied life rarely works that way. Most of the time, we simply morph gradually from one version of ourselves into another.
The interstate itself becomes the perfect metaphor. I-10 doesn’t really begin or end so much as slowly evolve from, and then become, another highway. At some point, you realize you’re on a different road, though you can’t quite identify where the change occurred.
As she travels, Hanks slowly realizes that healing may not arrive as revelation. There’s no grand cinematic moment where all wounds suddenly become understandable. Instead, the most meaningful moments on her journey come through small encounters with other people: dancing, music, conversations with strangers, moments of unguarded curiosity and connection. The divine, she seems to suggest, lives not in dramatic transformation but in fleeting moments of human communion.
Now, I’ll admit, there were moments I lost patience with the memoir. The unexamined life may not be worth living, but that doesn’t mean every thought requires extensive narration. But ultimately, I appreciated Hanks’s honesty about both her yearning for a tidy narrative and her gradual acceptance that life may never provide one.
What lingered with me was the way the book captures the peculiar beauty of road trips themselves—that sense of existing briefly outside ordinary routines, where your thoughts wander freely and surprise you with what was quietly waiting beneath the surface all along.
By the end of The 10, Hanks hasn’t solved herself or her past. But she has begun to understand that perhaps life isn’t a puzzle to solve at all. Perhaps it’s simply a road we travel for a while, alongside one another, changing gradually as we go.