17 audiobooks perfect for a road trip 🚙💨

August 15, 2021

two rows of book covers with overlaid text reading ''17 audiobooks to keep you company on a road trip''

A podcast-style YA mystery, a genre-bending romance, a fast-paced technothriller &

more audiobooks that will take your

road trip to the next level.

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Read this if: You're on a romance kick (or at least wish you were)

a copy of ''while we were dating'' sits amidst a beg of jasmine and green leaves

Credit: @jasminepics

While We Were Dating by Jasmine Guillory

Jasmine Guillory is back with another tale of lovable characters, relatable conundrums, and a fairytale romance that could warm even the coldest of hearts with her latest book While We Were Dating. After Ben Stephens locks in a huge advertising campaign with a rising Hollywood star named Anna Gardiner, sparks immediately fly between the two of them. It doesn't take long for their harmless flirtation to turn into a little something more, but when Ben and Anna get the opportunity to take their romance in front of the Hollywood spotlight, it comes with a few strings attached.

It's a charming and funny read that you can easily devour in one sitting. What I loved most about the latest installment in Jasmine's rom-com series is that she strayed away from the usual cat-and-mouse games her characters tend to play with each other. This time, Ben and Anna immediately address their attraction, which felt refreshing. Readers are quickly pulled into their lighthearted banter, but it's their open communication and chemistry that keep you truly invested in their love story. I love the little storybook universe Jasmine created with this series and how she manages to connect the old characters with the new! I truly enjoyed this book from beginning to end, and would definitely recommend it. Get your copy now. —Morgan Murrell

On the Verge: Imagining Women At Midlife In 14 Movies And Television Shows by Dana Spiotta

a black and white photo of author Dana Spiotta; a cover of her book Wayward against a solid background

Credit: Jessica Marx; Knopf

When I think of middle-aged women, I think of a number of literary figures, from Chaucer's The Wife of Bath to Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway to Evan S Connell's Mrs. Bridge. More recently, The Friend by Sigrid Nunez, with the loss and loneliness that pings through the narrator's consciousness, but also the humor. I think of middle-aged motherhood too: the mother Kiki in Zadie Smith's On Beauty, and the way that book regards the family romance within a specific cultural moment. I think about Doris Lessing's strange book, The Summer Before the Dark. A woman with grown children is bored and has a summer affair. But it ends fast and the book isn't about that as much as about searching for an identity beyond wife and mother. I think of hauntings, like Addie in William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, bitterly speaking to her children from beyond the grave, and Sethe in Toni Morrison's Beloved. So much of the texture of midlife is an internal accounting. But mostly my images of older women, mothers or not, come from movies and tv, vivid depictions of the so-called midlife crisis, female edition. Many show a woman in crisis because she is losing her looks, and thus, her value, like Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire, or because she has been left by her husband, and she is forced to make a new life, like Jill Clayburgh in An Unmarried Woman. When I was imagining my novel Wayward and my midlife protagonist, Sam, I began with her blowing up her life. I didn't want it to be because of an affair, and I didn't want it to be about fading beauty. I didn't even want it to be about how unhappy her marriage is but more of an internal reckoning with her place in the world. She has a comfortable,
privileged life, but it no longer feels right to her. Her mother is ailing, and her daughter is growing away from her. The politics of the country have gone completely off the rails, she can't sleep due to hot flashes, and she becomes undone. Here are some female midlife ruptures I was writing into, next to, and against:

1. Opening Night (John Cassavetes, 1977): A magnificent and soulful film in which Gena Rowlands plays Myrtle, an actress who has a dramatic,
gorgeous breakdown due to playing an older woman. She smokes and
drinks constantly and is haunted by a young fan in direct homage to All
About Eve. In one scene she argues with Sarah (Joan Blondell), the elderly
woman who wrote the play. It is striking for two reasons. One is that Sarah keeps asking Myrtle how old she is, and Myrtle won't answer (Rowlands was actually 47 at the time, and she looks at times both younger and older than her age, which I think is a feature of the middle years, that feeling of bothness). The other is that they actually discuss menopause! Hot flashes! I am so impressed that in all his films John Cassavetes had such curiosity about women of all ages. It is a male gaze, but it is a compassionate one. Plus Gena, Gena, Gena.

2. My Happy Family ( Simon Groß, Nana Ekvtimishvili, 2017): A late middle-aged woman leaves her home and life for no apparent reason other than she just wants some time alone to think unmolested by the demands of her grown children and clueless husband. There is a scene in which she eats a piece of cake by herself. I put a version of that cake moment in Wayward. It is actually in two places: once, as in the film, when my protagonist is in her first days alone. And then at the end with her daughter. Cake.

3. All About My Mother (Pedro Almodóvar 1999): An expressionistic film full of aging people who are or want to be mothers, who resist easy reductions of womanhood, and all while operating in the shadow of the depictions of the women in All About Eve and A Streetcar Named Desire.

4. Fleabag (season 2, episode 3, written by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, 2019): The whole series is compelling and unsentimental about aging women, including the terrifically narcissistic stepmother, played with glee by Olivia Coleman. But I loved this episode for this scene that went viral, in which Kristen Scott Thomas discusses the joyful relief of "the menopause."

5. All in the Family (season 2, episode 15, "Edith's Problem" John Rich, 1972): This famous Edith-in-menopause episode totally baffled me as a child, as no one talked about menopause ever, it seemed. Returning to it now, I admire how it is not only about fear of aging, but also about unleashing long held in anger. Her derangement leads to a kind of refusal. It seems radical, even as it resolves, in thirty minutes, back to status quo.

6. The Joy Luck Club (Wayne Wang, from Amy Tan's novel, 1993): I remember this as a huge hit film in my early adulthood. It was striking and moving to see depictions of complex relationships between older mothers and their adult daughters.

7. All About Eve (Herman Mankiewicz, 1950): The aging of a diva actress is the core of this proto-feminist film, along with the fear of being
supplanted by a younger version of yourself. Bette Davis is such a force it
overrides a simple reading. The way she carries her body, how she defiantly smokes and drinks too much, and her lack of vanity in cold cream makes it deep and complicated. She is irreplaceable precisely
because no one young could possess themselves the way she does or know
what she knows. She is a paradox, both scared of aging and rushing
headlong into it.

8. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974): An ordinary working class older woman has a torrid affair with a younger man who is also an Arab immigrant. The romance is socially frowned on because of discrimination and the age gap. Yet she persists, resisting what society expects of her.

9. All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1955): The inspiration for the Fassbinder film is this Sirk "woman's picture." Jane Wyman, middle-
aged but wealthy, has an affair with a young gardener, played by hunky
Rock Hudson. Her society friends and especially her grown children are
appalled by the age and class difference, but also their mother's desire.
After she capitulates and ends the affair, her children buy her a new console television. The film ends on a subversive image of Wyman's sad
face reflected on the blank black tube.

10. Year of the Woman (Sarah Hochman, 1973): An eccentric-but-bracing documentary about women libbers at the 1972 Democratic convention in which Shirley Chisholm (the first Black congresswoman) was in the running for vice president. Chisholm and the other feminists were shockingly ignored and condescended to by the Democratic establishment and the press. (This crucial confrontation was also depicted in Dahvi Waller's Mrs. America.) I saw this for the first time while I was writing Wayward. It inspired me with its humor, its raw revolutionary energy, and its loud, in-your-face, unapologetic feminism, especially from Florynce Kennedy, a middle-aged black activist who refuses to be ignored.

Wayward is BuzzFeed Book Club's August pick — click the button below to get your copy.