Don’t Think Twice

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. (Sept.)