The
RR Donnelley Award 2007
Truck: A Love Story
lMichael Perry
HarperCollins (October 17, 2006)
About the Book
From the publisher: “All I wanted to do,” says Michael Perry
, “was get my old pickup truck running. That, and plant a little vegetable garden. Then I got distracted by this woman….”
From the opening sentence – The story begins on a pile of sheep manure the size of a yurt – Perry turns Truck into an offbeat jaunt in which the author struggles to grow his own food (“seed catalogs are responsible for more unfulfilled fantasies than Enron and Penthouse combined”), live peaceably with his neighbors (one test-fires his black powder
rifle in the alley; another's best Sunday shirt reads 100 PERCENT WHUP-ASS) and sort out his love life. Along the way, he starts his hair on fire, is attacked by wild turkeys, takes a date to the fire department chicken dinner and proposes marriage to a woman in New Orleans.
As with Population: 485 , much of the spirit of Truck lives in the characters Perry meets: a oneeyed land surveyor; a paraplegic biker who rigs a sidecar so his quadriplegic pal can ride along; a bartender who refuses to sell light beer; an
enchanting woman who existed only on the inside flap of a cookbook and half the staff of National Public Radio.
Author information courtesy of the author's website
Michael Perry
Michael Perry is a humorist and author of the bestselling memoir Population 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time, and the essay collection Off Main Street. Perry has written for Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Outside, Backpacker, Orion and Salon.com, and is a contributing editor to Men’s Health. His essays have been heard on NPR’s All Things Considered and he has performed and produced two live audience recordings (I Got It From the Cows and Never Stand Behind a neezing Cow). Perry lives in rural Wisconsin, where he remains active as a volunteer firefighter and emergency medical responder. He can be found online at w.sneezingcow.com
Raised on a small dairy farm, Perry equates his writing career to cleaning calf pens – just keep shoveling, and eventually you’ve got a pile so big,
someone will notice. Perry further prepared for the writing life by reading every Louis L’Amour cowboy book he could get his hands on – most of them twice. He then worked for five summers on a real ranch in Wyoming, a career cut short by his fear of horses and an incident in which he almost avoided a charging bull. Based on a series of informal conversations held around the ol’ branding fire, Perry still holds the record for being the only cowboy in all of Wyoming who was simultaneously attending nursing school, from which he graduated in 1987, after giving the commencement address ina hairdo combining mousse spikes on top, a mullet in back and a moustache up front – otherwise known as the bad hair trifecta. Recently, Perry has begun to lose his hair, and, although his current classification varies depending on the lighting, he is definitely Bald Man Walking.
Perry has run a forklift, operated a backhoe, driven truck, worked as a proofreader and physical therapy aide, and has distinguished himself as a licensed cycle rider by careening into a concrete bridge completely unassisted. He has worked for a surgeon, answered a suicide hotline, picked rock in the rain with an alcoholic transvestite, was
a country music roadie in Switzerland and once worked as a roller-skating Snoopy. He can run a pitchfork, milk a cow in the dark, and say “I don’t understand” in French, Greek and Norwegian. He has never been bucked off a horse, and contends that falling off doesn’t count. He is utterly unable to polka.
Back to the top
