Book description
In 1963, when Lois Kulwicki's father loses his job at Studebaker
along with hundreds of other workers, he acts as if he has just been
promoted. He buys a new car (the only non-Studebaker he's ever
purchased) and takes his family on vacation. On the way home, Mom
dumps Dad at a Stuckey's, and that's the last they see of him.
Thirty years later, Lois has a family of her own, as fractured as her
childhood family. Divorced but still living with her ex, she decides
to move out with her two daughters and start over but then a stranger
named Henry enters their lives. Out of this ersatz family, Lois tries
to recover something of what she lost, beginning with a search for her
abandoned father. The Last Studebaker is a warmly comic tale of lives
changed forever, after the last Studebaker rolled off of the assembly line.
"An amazing work-a painstaking and painful, sympathetic and
exhaustive meditation upon the investment of American emotional life
in things." -David Shields, author of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto
and The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead, a New York
Times bestseller.
Robin Hemley is Director of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the
University of Iowa and author of ten books. His essays and fiction
have been published in the New York Times, New York Magazine, and the
Chicago Tribune.
