Amy Butcher

It recounts her struggle to reconcile her friendship with her college friend Kevin Schaeffer, who violently murdered his girlfriend after a psychotic break.

[10][11] The book was featured on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday with Rachel Martin,[12] WAMC's The Roundtable,[13] and Poets & Writers Magazine.

[14] The New York Times Sunday Review of Books said that "at the heart of this story, beyond Butcher's search to understand the incomprehensible, lies our societal failure to recognize serious depression as the potentially fatal illness that it is..." and that "her research offers a tragic portrait of the turn of events that left one young woman dead and another forever changed.

"[15] The Los Angeles Review of Books says that the structuring and manipulation of sensitive yet pertinent information throughout "feels insensitive, not to say irresponsible, to manipulate the reader thus...Leaving out what she knows in order to build suspense prevents her from investigating themes that might have layered this work with meaning and texture...by the time a sense of self-awareness swells, in the epilogue, the reader isn’t sure the narrator can be trusted.

Publishers Weekly wrote, "In this tender and gripping tale, essayist Butcher (Visiting Hours) recounts her unlikely adventure through Alaska with the country’s only female ice trucker, the late Joy “Mothertrucker” Wiebe… Along the way, Butcher explores myriad issues with nuance and grace, including Indigenous rights, violence against women, religious hypocrisy, and environmental concerns.

"[28] Kirkus Reviews called the book "a searching and deeply empathetic memoir," writing, "[Mothertrucker is] a sobering reflection on verbal and psychological abuse [that] honors the healing power of female friendship and questions the nature of divinity beyond its constricting patriarchal manifestations.

Her February 2018 Lit Hub essay "MIA: The Liberal Men We Love" was featured in Rebecca Traister's book[47] Good And Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger.

[48] Her December 2018 essay, "Flight Path," was awarded grand prize in Sonora Reviews 2018 flash prose contest[49] as judged by Nicole Walker.