There are books that seep into my consciousness as I read them, integrating their basic philosophy into my thought life. Sean Thor Conroe’s The Walk Book (Little Engines, June 2026) is one such book. While reading it, and for some time after, it changed how I related to strangers – to the outside world – and in so doing, shifted the course of a July Fourth trip I took with a friend to New Buffalo, Michigan, from Chicago.
Upon learning about the book and its premise, I knew I had to have it right away. The publisher was only planning to print 1,000 copies, and they’d all be given away. The exclusiveness of this offer made me jump, worried if I didn’t order one soon enough, they’d all be gone. I was curious who this publisher was, Adam Voith, and how could he afford to do this all for no charge? Adam and I had followed each other on Instagram for some time, but I didn’t know much about him. I looked him up online, and found out he was a retired talent agent, living in Nashville. He’d hand packed every single copy, carefully wrapping each one – each beautiful, cornflower blue copy – in tissue paper alongside a free copy of his magazine, Little Engines. It was a bit meta, the way they were giving this book away for free. Before I’d even begun reading the book, I was already encountering the kindness of strangers (of Adam, of Sean) – their generosity — the first of many generous strangers I’d encounter as I read The Walk Book, both in the book and in my real life.
At 23 years old, Conroe sets out to walk across America, from Philadelphia where he lived to Santa Cruz, where his mother did. The text is a diaristic stream of consciousness as he walks, tracing Conroe’s path through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, and finally, to Colorado, where (spoiler alert) his journey on foot prematurely ends. As he walks, he records voice into his phone and writes in journals, stopping in numerous McDonald’s along the way to rest and make sense of his musings. I’m struck, as I read, that our country could easily be viewed that way: a string of endless McDonald’s. I’m reminded of a drive I once took from San Francisco to Ann Arbor by way of Santa Fe, and the number of McDonald’s I stopped at in various states – California, Colorado, Nebraska, Illinois. When you’re in the middle of nowhere, those golden arches by the side of the highway beckon from miles away.
Reading this book replicates the feeling of walking. His stream of consciousness becomes one with the reader’s. You can zone out and zone back in and it won’t necessarily have mattered what exactly you missed. Thoughts wander and circle back aimlessly, no real plot to speak of. The concept begins as an antidote to the alienation of modern life, broadly. The writing life, specifically. “It was the inking of an idea…” Conroe writes, “something to do with the insularity of writing and writers and the writing world and the need to break free of it, to confront life face to face, to see what’s outside the window.” The craving to confront what is real, what is fundamental, animalistic even, about surviving in the outdoors, nothing to propel him but his own two feet and whatever he can carry on his back and in his cart (which plays a surprisingly central role in the story of his journey.) He was, in my interpretation, facing a dark night of the soul at 23 years old. The same age, I might note, as my own solo road trip across the US. The very juncture, which feels so pivotal, between our modern American extended adolescence and adulthood. “The point is not to get across, the point is to prove I can move at my own pace, sleep wherever I end up, live in direct contact with the outdoors. The point, if there is one, is to never shy away from the world. To see if I can.” At 23, he’d reached a breaking point with reading and writing. Felt he’d been writing himself away from Life (his capitalization, not mine). “When you can no longer read, you travel,” Conroe writes, “and only once you reach the point of no longer being able to travel, can you start reading again.”
My greatest takeaway, from his odyssey, is the aforementioned general kindness of strangers. In the years since my own trip, at 23, I’ve grown generally more wary of people. Have developed a much needed cynicism when it comes to random acts of generosity. Nothing is truly free, and I’ve learned the hard way that we can sometimes be punished for believing in a fundamental human goodness. For being too open, too eager, too trusting of our fellow man. However, Conroe’s trip across America restored some of my faith in that fundamental goodness. Made me believe, once again, that people, in general, are looking to help. That the act of helping itself is its own reward. “It’s like this with all heroic tales: by helping the hero continue his journey, you become part of the story, and in so doing reiterate the value of the hero’s quest.”
Along the way, Conroe stays in strangers’ homes, is invited in for home cooked meals, receives motel stays completely free, meets families, fellow travelers, churchgoers, Americans. When a man in Kansas puts him up for the night, he writes, “How strange the world can be, I think as I lather myself thoroughly, into all my crevices, between my toes, on my face, in my pits, how atomized and isolating everything can feel and then with one moment of opening your heart the world opens up, something is Happening again, everything becomes new and strange again.” As a woman, of course, I would never do these things. This is distinctively a man’s story. That said, I recall thinking the same, as I stopped for a chicken sandwich at a McDonald’s in the middle of Nebraska. How kind people in this country can be, particularly when you’ve come from far away. Stopped in a backwater town. How curious and open minded they might seem. How strange, to think that these people have been here, all this time. Living their lives in these houses. These restaurants and churches. They’d been there the entire time, all while you’d had no knowledge of their town’s existence. Like, duh, you might be thinking. Girl from Manhattan living in Chicago realizes there’s more to our country than NY, LA, and their ilk. Sometimes I need a reminder.
When I was younger – more naive – I thought of homelessness as a binary thing. One was either housed, or one was not. This book challenges that assumption. There’s a porousness to the concept of homelessness, which now feels obvious. Conroe is a handsome, erudite guy. A striking, full-body shot of him graces the back cover of the book, and it’s clear to the reader that his good looks probably got him far in terms of winning the trust and assistance of strangers on his walk. “He attended Swarthmore College and the Columbia University School of the Arts,” his About the Author reads. “He is the author of Fuccboi, published by Little Brown in 2022.” He is not, by any stretch, who comes to mind when we think of the unhoused. For these months he was traveling though, he was. He sometimes stayed in shelters, received a police voucher for a motel along the way to keep him off the streets. Had practically no money in the bank. “I’m being homeless,” he writes, “but I’m doing a cool thing while doing it.” The book and life experience both, changed, to some degree, the way I think about homelessness. It couldn’t happen to anyone, but it could happen to many people, and the sands of wealth and comfort can shift beneath our feet with little warning. It occurs, I imagine, gradually, then quickly.
At the time of the book’s publication – at the time of my reading – a young woman (an OnlyFans girl, if you will), Kamryn Ranae, is hiking the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada. As of early July, she has 241,000 followers taking this journey alongside her on Instagram, as she live vlogs the experience. She dresses in cute pink and purple outfits. Her gear is aesthetic and she takes us along on grocery store trips, motel stays, camping stops, mountain treks through the snowy summer Sierras, and more. There’s something in the air. Something in the zeitgeist about walking. Something about being, as Conroe puts it, “in direct contact with the outdoors.” We, as a people – as a country, a world – are craving something raw. Something real. Proof that life exists beyond our office jobs and apartments and screens. And yet, the journey must be memorialized on Instagram. In the pages of a book. These walks, like everything else, are a thing to be packaged and made into media. To share with an audience. If a tree falls in the forest but no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound?
I mentioned earlier that this book seeped into my consciousness. Shifted the tide of a weekend getaway to a beach town in West Michigan, that a writer friend and I took as I read this book. We were staying at a hotel a mile outside of downtown New Buffalo and hadn’t rented a car. Instead, had taken Amtrak in, just an hour from Union Station in Chicago’s West Loop. We joked, as we walked on the road’s shoulder from the beach to our hotel that we, like Conroe, were on our own epic walk. It was the kind of country road where cars whizzed by – narrow shoulder, no sidewalk. That evening, we went into town for dinner and fireworks. On our way home, we were caught in a torrential downpour. There were no Ubers anywhere. With the generosity of Conroe’s new friends in mind, we did something for the first time in our lives: We stuck our thumbs out by the side of the road and waited for maybe ten minutes, before a nice German man with Illinois plates and his pre-teen son pulled up and offered us a ride. Had I not been reading The Walk Book on that trip, I can’t say I would’ve even thought to have done that. To have had faith that a charitable stranger might take pity on us and give us a five minute ride. We thanked him profusely, laughing about our experience as we got back to our hotel room, put on Pretty Woman. I was thankful though, that our journey was one mile and not three thousand.
That was not the end of our travel snafus. At three in the morning, Amtrak cancelled our train home, without explanation. In a pinch, we booked a bus out of Benton Harbor, a half hour away from New Buffalo, and somehow managed to find an Uber driver to take us there. When he dropped us off at a truck stop though, we quickly found out that no buses picked up there, despite it being labeled the Greyhound Bus Stop. We had fifteen minutes before our bus left town to get a mile and a half down the road to our actual pickup stop, and again, no Ubers in sight. We were in a real bind. I can thank The Walk Book for what happened next. Three young men – 23 years old, like Conroe at the time of his walk – walked into the gas station. My friend went to use the bathroom and I approached one of them, completely desperate. He kindly offered to drop us off at the bus station. We’d make it back to Chicago after all! When his friends rejoined him in the car though, the plan quickly changed. “You’re going to Chicago too?” The boy whose car it was asked. “Us too. Why don’t you just ride with us?” And we did, all two hours home, making conversation the entire way. Becoming friends with these guys, who otherwise would’ve been gas station strangers. It was the very ethos of Conroe’s walk. And I never would’ve done it – wouldn’t have believed it even possible – had I not read the book.
