Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary

end of The Spectator, and this week I'm very pleased to be joined by Joanne Pocock, the author of the

award-winning memoir, Surrender, whose new book is called Greyhound and describes a trip or two trips she took by Greyhound Bus from the East of America to the West.

Joanna, this book is very many things, but a really good advert for travelling on a Greyhound bus as a nice holiday. It is not.

Yes.

Tell me what you found and why you decided to take this trip.

Well, first of all, thank you for having me on, Sam.

It's a delight to be here.

As you just said, the book is many things.

It's described the United States edition has the word memoir on the cover, just to make

that clear. It is nonfiction. Why did I do it? Well, I'm sort of fascinated by the United States,

but I'm really fascinated by the sides that rarely get talked about. And at the moment, it does feel like

it's quite a divided, complicated country. So seeing it from the belly of a Greyhound bus felt like a

very good vantage point to look at a lot of what's going on there. The very first trip I took in 2006,

which I write about in the book, was done for more sort of personal reasons. I wanted to kind of

flee. I wanted to escape. And so I went off on a Greyhound bus. But my return trip in

2023 was very different because I was there to

write about it, which made for a very different experience. And that first trip you went on,

you say you were kind of fleeing. You were dealing with a lot of grief and difficulty and a sort of turning point

in your life, weren't you? Can you kind of set the scene for that a little bit for us?

Yeah, I mean, it wasn't anything extreme. I think it was probably a lot of grief that a lot of

people share. So my sister had died about 18 months before I went on that 2006 Greyhound

...