Guest post by The California Dreamers author Amy Mason Doan
Amy Mason Doan is the bestselling author of The Summer List, Summer Hours, and Lady Sunshine. She earned a BA in English from UC Berkeley and an MA in journalism from Stanford University. She grew up in Danville, California, and now lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and daughter. Visit her website at amymasondoan.com and on Instagram, @amymasondoan.
About The California Dreamers (released April 8th 2025): A group of siblings captured in an iconic beach photo reunite on a sunny California island, where they’re forced to face the fallout of their unconventional upbringing—and the golden secret that has been simmering ever since…
Vanners are everywhere on social media, sharing pics of their custom rigs, tips for showering, parking, and stowing gear, and scenery framed by flung-open rear doors. I can’t resist a good reel on how to bathe for three bucks at Planet Fitness or craft a modular mattress by Velcro-ing sofa cushions together.
But life on wheels is not all about photo opps and silk bedding, and luckily we have books to get a more layered look at the RV lifestyle. The bad—safety worries, icy showers, stale pie for breakfast, engine breakdowns, and personal breakdowns. The good—no rent, epic scenery, bonding with other vanners.
Here are ten books that capture the gritty but exhilarating reality of van life before #vanlife:
Travels with Charley: In Search of America, John Steinbeck, 1962
Steinbeck’s memoir of his 1960 road-trip with his French poodle, Charley, is conversational, funny, and poignant. The author, late in his career, transforms a GMC pickup into a mobile home for the cross-country journey, nicknaming it “Rocinante” after Don Quixote’s horse – a nod to the futility of his mission to learn “what Americans are like today.”
Over 10,000 miles, we meet sailors, migrant potato-pickers, and wealthy cattle-ranchers. When Charley refuses to pee on the giant redwoods in California, Steinbeck smiles but gets serious: “The vainest, most slap-happy and irreverent of men, in the presence of redwoods, goes under a spell of wonder and respect.”
The Leisure-Seeker, Michael Zadoorian, 2010
Van life featuring octogenarians navigating a jarring medical diagnosis. “The Leisure Seeker” is the brand of Ella and John Robina’s 1978 RV, and this warm-hearted, unflinching novel takes us along Route 66 for one bittersweet, last trip to Disneyland. This one’s freewheeling but urgent, and it’s thoroughly moving.
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe, 1968
Wolfe’s account of tripping (in both senses) with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters in a painted school bus is rich in casual firsthand details about acid-dropping, evading the FBI, and cameos from a Who’s Who of 60s counterculture, including beat poets and the Grateful Dead. I first read it when Allen Ginsberg spoke at my college graduation, and it’s just as vivid as I remember. Take this early description of the schoolbus: “glowing orange, green, magenta, lavender, chorine blue…as if somebody had given Hieronymus Bosch fifty buckets of Day-Glo paint and a 1939 International Harvester schoolbus and told him to go to it.”
The book doesn’t romanticize the journey – (spoiler alert) Kesey ends up in jail at the end. But it pays respectful tribute to the longing for a different life that courses through the wanderers’ blood as steadily as any mind-altering substance.
Peeps, Erin Gordon, 2021
RV Life Magazine says Gordon’s novel “universally speaks to the adventurer in all of us…that yearning drive to reflect, refocus, and even replace our stagnant life with something new.”
Protagonist Meg, a 51-year-old podcaster who interviews “peeps” for her podcast of the same name, uses her solo motorhome odyssey to reflect on her mother’s death, her divorce, and her empty nest.
A touching novel with sharply observed moments of humor.
Blue Highways, William Least Heat-Moon, 1982
An incandescent travelogue about a 1978 road trip. No interstates here. The author’s retrofitted Ford Ecoline van, nicknamed “Ghost Dancing,” traverses 13,000 miles along sleepy state routes highlighted blue on his frayed map. Heat-Moon searches for meaning in conversations with strangers, a tattered copy of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and solo nights sleeping inside his rig. This one deserves a resurgence.
Surfing & Health, Dorian Paskowitz, 1997
“Doc” Paskowitz’s memoir of living in a van with his wife Juliette and their nine children, surfing and adhering to his rules about diet, exercise, and nature, is iconic among surfers. A Stanford-trained physician, Paskowitz rejected conventional medicine for what he envisioned as a healthier lifestyle, taking his family along for the ride. “My spirit shrank until there was nothing left,” he says of pre-RV life. On the road and in the water, it bloomed again.
Paskowitz’s book inspired my own novel…
The California Dreamers, 2025
Imagines life for the only girl in a surf-van family and how she and her siblings wrestle with their past at their father’s island memorial service. Ronan, my heroine, flees the lifestyle at 17, but still longs for what her family once had, imperfect as it was. “We drive at night and park by beaches under tree cover, never too close to anyone else. I shut my eyes in San Diego and open them in San Francisco.”
Strangers on the beach mock their home, a rehabbed food truck, as a “roach coach,” but her mother tells her to pity them. “We glide,” she says. “They’re stuck, but we glide.”
Nomadland: Surviving America in the 21st Century, Jessica Bruder, 2017
Bruder’s searing book was adapted into a movie starring Frances McDormand, and more than any book on this list delves honestly into the economics of vanning. Is it truly “vanning by choice” when financial crises force you into gig work? Bruder’s subjects wrestle with doubt, shame, family judgment, safety fears – especially the women – but there is a steady pulse of beauty here, especially in the connections within the RV community.
Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer, 1996
Krakauer’s story of Christopher McCandless, a wealthy 24-year-old who sought a purer existence off the grid in Alaska.
McCandless’s abandoned bus is a symbol of hope and tragedy in this unsparing work, also adapted into an acclaimed film.
In Search of Captain Zero, Allan C. Weisbecker, 2002
Weisbecker roams Central America from Mexico to Costa Rica searching for an old surf buddy, stopping when the perfect swell calls. He looks within, too, especially at some of the dark ways he and the missing friend funded their lifestyle.
Think The Endless Summer meets Heart of Darkness. It’s unforgettable.
