Don't Think Twice

June 20, 2016
In this uneven memoir about buying a motorcycle and taking off on a cross-country joyride at age 50, Schoichet comes across as that friend whom you never found particularly interesting who surprises you by suddenly going big. She is coming off a series of bad turns—a break-up with her girlfriend, her mother’s death, and the loss of her job—which seems to give her permission to do something just because she really wants to do it. She buys her first motorcycle in New York and rides it home to L.A. Schoichet is hard-pressed to make this superficially interesting narrative come to life. She has a mystical experience at the battlefield of Gettysburg that she struggles to describe beyond the word “amazing.” More famous sites are seen (Graceland was “bizarre”), pizza is ordered, and crummy motel rooms are found, but it is beyond her grasp to capture the spirits of the people and communities she finds, or her own feelings about living on the road. Still, the memoir stands as a monument to self-confidence and self-direction and to doing what you feel compelled to do, even when people cluck and you can’t explain to yourself why you’re doing it. Agent: Linda Chester, Linda Chester Literary.

July 1, 2016
How a cross-country motorcycle ride helped the author combat severe depression."We've all had them--those unbelievably bad years in which one thing after another happens, and we begin to think that something greater than ourselves is trying to tell us something," writes Schoichet. "In my case, it seemed like I was taunting disaster, because before my life went to hell, I was completely unaware I was heading for a storm." In less than a year, she lost her job as a publicity writer at a major studio, her girlfriend of six years, and her mother. Devastated by these events, the author knew she had to do something daring in order to get on with her life. So she bought a Harley-Davidson online and decided to ride it from Buffalo to Los Angeles. She figured she'd either die on the highway or learn how to live again. Schoichet fills her memoir of her three-week adventure with sketches of the helpful, crazy, and sometimes-creepy characters she met on her journey--e.g., the group of Harley riders who surrounded her when she stopped to stretch her legs on the side of the road and the woman who took care of her after arriving at a motel in a terrible rainstorm, among many others. The author interweaves stories of her mother and her sisters into the details of her life on the road as she tries to gain perspective on everything that happened in the past, and although she didn't necessarily find a state of Zen, the ride was definitely therapeutic. Schoichet's account will resonate with bikers and with those who have always wondered what it feels like to go 100 miles per hour on a motorcycle, but others may find the narrative overly self-indulgent and long. An all-inclusive and honest account of how one woman used a motorcycle journey to come to grips with painful events in her life.

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August 1, 2016
At 50, Schoichet loses her job, her girlfriend of six years, and her mother, all within six months. Her method of healing is to travel 4,000 miles across America on her newly acquired used Harley. In this chronicle of a midlife-crisis road trip, Schoichet describes tackling physical and emotional challenges on the open highway, sometimes at 100 mph, navigating back to . . . life via various adventures in which she overcame inexperience and overconfidence (at one point, a police officer made her view a grisly accident as a warning). In Gatlinburg, she dines on cashews and moonshine, agitated by a fisherman's repeatedly unsuccessful casts: I needed him to prove something elusive could be caught . . . the creature had become everything that had gotten away from me. Schoichet believes four wheels move the body; two wheels move the soul. Often surprising, witty, and thoughtful, this is a bittersweet and entertaining read.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)