Gone the Hard Road: A Memoir

by Lee Martin

"Count your blessings," his mother told him, "Think of everything good in your life."

Pulitzer Prize finalist Lee Martin has done it again. Building from his acclaimed first memoir, From Our House, which recounts the farming accident that cost his father both his hands, Gone the Hard Road is the story of Beulah Martin's endurance and sacrifice as a mother, and the gift of imagination she offered her son. Martin unfolds the world she created for him within their unsettled family life, from the first time she read to him in a doctor's office waiting room, to enrolling him in a children's book club, to the books she bought him in high school. Gone the Hard Road portrays Beulah's selflessness as the family moved around the Midwest, sometimes in the face of her husband's opposition, to show her son a different way of being. Rather than concentrate on the life his father threatened to destroy, as Martin's previous memoirs do, Gone the Hard Road offers the counternarrative of a loving mother and the creative life she made possible, in spite of the eventual cost to herself.

A poignant, honest, and moving read, Gone the Hard Road will stay with anyone who has ever struggled to find their place in the world.

172 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 4, 2021

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author on Goodreads with the name Lee Martin.

Lee Martin, author of The Bright Forever.
Lee Martin, Mystery Novels.
Lee Martin, Pseudonym of Anne Wingate
Lee Martin, Western Novels.

Reviews

[Donna Burtch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enjoyed an online discussion including a group of folks and Lee Martin himself (just after this group read his memoir). The title is a powerful one for any of us who know what it is like to live or to visit relatives who live down dirt roads, maybe in farming or rural communities.
He is pretty unflinching about the challenges in his family, in his home, in his soul. Lee Martin is truly gifted in describing settings and sounds so you quite feel you are in the book, seeing things through his storytelling eyes. There were moments of heartbreak that made my throat burn.

[Robert Kerbeck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lee Martin’s Gone the Hard Road is a heartbreaking memoir about a young man growing up with a father who lost both hands in a farming accident. The weight of that tragedy nearly pulls the narrator and his family under, but Martin’s mother shares her love of literature with him, giving Martin his escape from their small Illinois town. In his quiet midwestern way, Martin has written an emotional powerhouse of a book. Gone the Hard Road will shake you, but it will also affirm your faith in the resiliency of the human spirit.

[Ronalee · Rating 5 out of 5]

A story of a unique upbringing ~ Lee and his folks will linger a while.

[Shane DM · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this sequel to Lee Martin's first memoir, From This House, the author focuses his attention on his mother, his relationship to her, how he leaned on her for succor and support when his father menaced and terrified him. I found this book somewhat inferior to the first, only because several episodes were repeated. A newcomer to Lee Martin could easily read this volume and experience anew the strength that is evident in its pages. But I had read the first FIRST and the stories were fresh in my mind while reading the second. This is my only criticism. Otherwise, it's a nostalgic story that cuts deep, especially when the parents are inching ever closer to their last days and Lee is far away doing his own thing, missing out on time spent with them. I too have felt this guilt of getting engrossed in my own life while one by one my grandparents die off and all I have at the end is regret for not driving the 200 miles to their quaint turqoise house and sitting down for a cup of lemonade.