Book of the Month: Nowhere For Very Long
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Nowhere For Very Long: A book to inspire adventure and wanderlust. Published in just 2022, Nowhere For Very Long: The Unexpected Road To An Unconventional Life was written by a badass woman on the run from her white-picket past, who chose the Utah desert as her oasis to roam free. In the merciless deserts and red canyons of southern Utah, Brianna Madia found her escape and future.
With her husband, pack of wild dogs, and brighter-than-the-sun orange van, Madia shifted her life and mindset when she started driving out into the wild Utah terrain for days and weeks on end. For what, exactly? Even she couldn’t say for the longest time. All she knew was that she found freedom in the deserted dirt roads that led nowhere, peace under the starry and silent skies, power and courage when she surpassed her own expectations of herself, and happiness on the road.
““As I turned off the pavement and onto the dirt road for my first solo trip, it occurred to me that I might have to be my own inspiration.””
Nowhere For Very Long is Madia’s A to B, documenting her mental journey from a Connecticut childhood—where neighbors peered judgingly across the street at each other and where your worth was dictated by the kind of car you drove—to choosing a life built out of an orange van named Bertha.
Nowhere For Very Long
Originally Published: 2022
Pages: 272
Available on: Kindle, Paperback, Hardcover, Audiobook
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She details, with great humor, storytelling talent, and intimate confessions, her mental process as she underwent a huge life transformation: how she broke free from convention and societal expectations to lead the life that she felt she was most comfortable and empowered to live. There were setbacks, doubts, fears, and mistakes, and her humble and down-to-earth dictation of how she made mental leaps and bounds is captivating for readers.
““It became comforting to think of fear as a vessel of freedom. I had scared myself right into the kind of life I wanted.””
Madia grew up in suburban Connecticut and experienced a disruptive childhood that seeped back into the cracks of her adult journey. Humbly, Madia wonders, reconciles, and recalls deep sorrow and the low moments of her life. She displays a great deal of honesty about the kind of pain that is hard to talk about, let alone to an audience of the world.
She meets her husband, Neil, as a teenager, and together, they begin to take on the world, one unconventional step at a time. Their love story is entwined with Madia’s individual journey to find herself and her own life-track, but their connection is a beautiful aspect of what could have been a one-woman-show. She doesn’t take her female independence and slap readers in the face with it (as many are prone to do). Instead, she admits her loss for words and know-how (that gradually declined) and dependence on her husband.
Straight out of college, they spent a humid summer in an old sailboat parked in a harbor on the East Coast before the simultaneously monumental and nonchalant decision to move west. They selected Salt Lake City, where they both found jobs and used the city as a base to venture further and further out into the vast terrain of the state.
They had two dogs and hardly a bank account between the two of them when Brianna’s eye, and heart, landed on an orange van with tank-sized tires. Enter “Bertha.” Gradually, Neil and Brianna (and Bertha) broke away from society. They moved out of their apartment into the van, parking around the city and trying to stick out a snowy winter in their large metal vessel on wheels, with no insulation.
““We simply traded a set of four walls for a set of four wheels on a Tuesday afternoon in September and the world spun on.””
As her comfort zone expanded and her past barriers broke down, she and Neil wandered down slot canyons and hung out among desert shrubs and counted the stars. Madia found herself constantly wondering…How far can I push? What else can I get away with? What else can I do that someone or something or some system told me is not okay or normal or responsible to do?
““I had spent enough time at the edge of cliffs to know I could not hesitate. The longer you stand at the top of something, the less likely you are to jump off.””
Coming from the structure that is American society, life can feel mapped out for many people, and many people are okay with that. Brianna Madia is not one of those people. However, it was not without fear that she made choice after choice after choice to keep pursuing her individual idea of what it means to lead a fulfilling life. There was no concrete or tangible or measurable quantity to what she was pursuing.
““For as long as I’d been alive, I’d listened to people talk through their teeth about all the trips they would take and the hobbies they would pick up and the books they would write and the bands they would start, only to watch those dreams get stacked away in old boxes behind record collections and dusty picture frames.””
So, she quit her full-time job in Salt Lake City and once again jumped into the unknown to fuel and fund her lifestyle via Bertha and Instagram. One by one, she cut ties with what society expected from her and what she used to expect for herself, roaming into uncharted territory.
Madia’s book is full of her vivid anecdotes and ramblings, each portrait of her experiences, as unusual and inspiring and unexpected as the last. I won’t give more away, but this down-to-earth and heartwarming memoir is the real-life inspiring story that you have been missing.
Madia is an excellent writer. You can’t ask more from a writer than to be as funny and honest as she is about her personal life, to be able to take a bad experience and laugh at herself in retrospect, to be truthful about not knowing what the hell she was—and is—doing half the time. But she did it anyway, trying and failing, and then trying again anyway. Her bravery shines through each pitfall.
Nowhere For Very Long was a New York Times Bestseller, Wall Street Journal Bestseller, and USA TODAY! Bestseller. Before becoming a bestselling author, Madia made a name for herself through Instagram, creating vanlife travel content that supported her adventurous lifestyle.
Nowhere For Very Long is for any reader who Ioves travel, adventures, inspiring true stories, and the outdoors. It is a fast, engaging read that will have you wondering what mishap Brianna and her crew gets into next. Take a peek at it to fuel up your own tank of wanderlust!
““All my life, I’d assumed it was only brave people who did brave things. I’d never once considered how many of them were absolutely terrified.””