An Interview with Meaghan Garvey

Toward the end of Midwestern Death Trip, her richly detailed history of a region and war-report from its bars and supper clubs, Meaghan Garvey raises an existential fear. “What did it mean that every writer I admired had drank themselves to at least temporary ruin? And was I crazy to believe that 20 years of drinking had given me more than it had taken away?” she asks. As it so happens, that question comes at the bottom of a page. At the top of the next one, a hand-wave slyly loaded with an actual philosophy: “Anyway, never take life advice from people who hate life.”