Driving with Dead People - Softcover

""Driving with Dead People" is a heartbreaking, hilarious, and page-turning read. In the space of one sentence Monica Holloway can break your heart and make you laugh out loud at the same time. Her memoir has the momentum of a good mystery novel -- the kind you stay up all night reading to find out what happens to the heroine, because you love her so much. This is a stunning debut of a writer who deals with difficult material and makes it fresh and moving." -- Barbara Abercrombie, author of "Writing Out the Storm" and "Courage & Craft"

At nine years old, Monica Holloway develops a fascination with the local funeral home. Small wonder, with a father who drives his Ford pick up with a Kodak movie camera sitting shotgun just in case he sees an accident, and whose home movies feature more footage of disasters than of his children. In between her father's bouts of violence and abuse, Monica becomes fast friends with Julie Kilner, whose father is the town mortician. She and Julie preferred the casket showroom to the parks and grassy backyards in her hometown of Elk Grove, Ohio, where they would take turns lying in their favourite coffins. In time, Monica and Julie get a job driving the company hearse to pick up bodies from the airport, yet even Monica's growing independence can't protect her from her parents' irresponsibility, and from the feeling that she simply does not deserve to be safe. Little does she know, as she finally strikes out on her own, that her parents' biggest betrayal has yet to be revealed...