Staff Reports
A Columbus native and first-time author is enjoying a homecoming this week.
Melissa Stephenson’s autobiographical book, “Driven: A White-Knuckled Ride to Heartbreak and Back,” describes her life path, woven together by the automobiles she rode in or drove along the way.
Marketing materials from publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt of Boston describe Stephenson’s story:
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“From a lineage of secondhand family cars of the late ’60s, to the Honda that carried her from Montana to Texas as her new marriage disintegrated, to the ’70s Ford she drove away from her brother’s house after he took his life (leaving Melissa the truck, a dog, and a few mixed tapes), to the VW van she now uses to take her kids camping, she knows these cars better than she knows some of the people closest to her. Driven away from grief, and toward hope, Melissa reckons with what it means to lose a beloved sibling.”
The opening third of the book is set in Columbus, where Stephenson was born and lived until she was an eighth-grader.
Stephenson, now 43, was a student at Northside Middle School in Columbus until she got the chance to attend high school at the private Interlochen Center for the Arts. She went on a scholarship from Columbus-based Cummins.
She returns at least yearly to spend time with her parents, Glen and Janet Stephenson, who still live in the family home near Donner Park.
“It was a fun place to grow up. My brother and I hopped on our bikes and roamed down the neighborhood. I definitely felt we had a lovely free-range childhood in that way,” she said Thursday from Chicago, where she was sightseeing for the day with her children, ages 9 and 12, as part of their week-long stay in Columbus.
Stephenson is scheduled to appear at a book-signing event Saturday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Viewpoint Books in Columbus, where “Driven” is the store’s No. 2 seller in adult non-fiction.
Her appearance in Columbus is the seventh since a July 24 book-launch party in Missoula, Montana, where she now resides.
Although she left Columbus fairly early in life, the new book has allowed Stephenson to reconnect with people from her adolescence.
“I just met for coffee with a best friend from middle school. She lost her only brother, too,” Stephenson said.
Some of Stephenson’s fond early memories of her hometown include the smell of glazed doughnuts from the Sapp’s factory on weekend mornings.
“It was a charmed place to grow up,” said Stephenson of life in Columbus during the 1970s and 1980s.
Despite such memories, there was also a realization that she felt like a square peg in a round hole, she said.
“I felt a desire to travel and go places,” Stephenson said.
And so she did, by car.
Stephenson headed to college in Montana to study writing, traveling west in a 1984 Saab 900S.
She learned her craft in pursuit of a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Montana, followed by Master of Fine Arts degree from Texas State University.
In 2008, Stephenson began writing small snippets of her life and that of her brother, Matthew, growing up in Indiana.
That writing pursuit continued until about 2013, when Stephenson said she realized they weren’t just short pieces.
“I knew somehow I had to write this harder, more difficult story about my brother’s death,” which occurred after he moved to Athens, Georgia, to be part of the music scene there.
“It was too heavy, too hard. I didn’t know how to tell that story,” she said.
That’s when she came upon the shaping device of cars.
“We spent so much time driving around in Indiana,” Stephenson said. “When telling the story of cars, which was central to our family, the bigger narrative fell into place.”
Her first new car, a 1978 Plymouth Volare, is included, along with the 1979 Ford 150 pickup truck she inherited from her brother.
“I wrote the book completely on my own, then revised and revised and revised,” Stephenson said.
The next step was finding an agent, then scheduling meetings with major publishers, who were interested.
By August 2016, she had a deal with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
“It was really about taking one step at a time,” she said.
The next step in her publishing career is a second book, this one a novel. Stephenson said she just completed the first draft.
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Columbus native Melissa Stephenson will sign copies of her newly released book, “Driven: A White-Knuckled Ride to Heartbreak and Back,” between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. Saturday Viewpoint Books, 548 Washington St. At 11:30 a.m., Stephenson will read from her memoir.
Available in hardcover, the book sells for $23.
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