What other books have you written?
I’ve written two books of non-fiction.
Zen and Now: On the trail of Robert Pirsig and the art of motorcycle maintenance is about a road trip I took in 2004 on my old motorcycle, following the exact route of author Robert Pirsig and his son Chris. My book is partly biographical, telling the story of Pirsig and how he came to transcend madness and write his hugely popular 1974 book Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, and it’s partly my own story, wrestling with the challenges of being a parent, and it’s also just a great road trip. It was published in 2008 by Knopf.
Canada’s Road: A journey on the Trans-Canada Highway from St. John’s to Victoria, is an account of driving one of the longest roads in the world, and how the highway came to be and what it’s become. I wrote it originally as a blog for Maclean’s Magazine, updating it daily with something old, something new, and something “different” for the three months it took to travel the highway’s 7,700 kilometres. It was published as a book the next year by Dundern Press.