Rewriting Your Story in “Run for the Hills”

My golden rule is that if Kevin Wilson is writing it, I’m reading it. I could read his grocery list and still feel a punch to the gut.

Run for the Hills is no exception. It’s wacky and full of heart, but in between each laugh I felt gutted. It is a story of family and the many shapes it can take, but it is also much more, asking why the ones who leave and the ones who lie are always the epicenter, always the focal point. In Run for the Hills, Kevin Wilson takes the camera and refocuses the lens, telling the story of the ones left behind. This is their story.

Mad, an organic farmer in her thirties, is resigned to her solitary lifestyle on her farm that her father, Charles, or Chuck, or Chip, or Carl, left behind. His real name is Charles, but he picked up a new identity every time he left and started a new family. Mad remains the unchanged version of herself that he abandoned, the girl cradling a chicken, shoving the rest of it down until all of her sadness calcified into little stones she doesn’t feel, weight she doesn’t notice. She’s a farmer after all. She carries the earth on her back.

Suddenly, Mad’s quiet life is interrupted by her newly discovered half brother, Rube, showing up at her farm. Rube is at once soft and jagged, desperate and pleading, reaching out a hand for Mad to reluctantly take. He shows up with stories of his father, same name as Mad’s dad but an entirely different man—a writer from Boston, whereas the only father Mad ever knew was a farmer in Tennessee. 

They begin to exist in a sort of symbiosis, their sharp edges molding like clay around each other as they digest each piece of alarming information after the next. Because Rube has come with a plan: they’re going to (hopefully) collect their other half siblings and (even more hopefully) locate their dad. They set off in their PT Cruiser, another part of this novel that is both sarcastic and sweet, because a story like this is all in the details, in the particulars that Wilson paints with so much color. 

Throughout the drive, Mad and Rube fill in the blanks of their father, trading versions of him, aching for the Venn diagram to meet. But it’s more complicated to reconcile how your author father and farmer father is also a high school basketball coach and filmmaker. Enter Pep, the basketball star, and Tom, the eleven-year-old boy whose arrival makes the story’s heart double in size. The way Wilson distills the squirmy emotions of feeling both too large and too small for the world, with the blunt sincerity of a child, is masterfully done.   

Their trip is hopeful and kinetic, the car swirling with mixed emotion. Amidst the rapidly growing love, they’re each forced to confront something deeper, reckoning with their origins in such claustrophobic proximity, with stunning depictions of anxiety. Kevin Wilson sees people, he sees that everyone holds a little kernel of something within, as he writes, “almost like he had water in his ears and he was trying to get it out without anyone noticing.” He vocalizes those nagging things, the itch you can’t quite reach, the language they’re searching for to explain who they want to be. Because it is from their dad that each child formed an identity: farming, writing, basketball, and filmmaking.

But the farmer, writer, coach, and filmmaker—they are all one person, one dad. He quickly, in being all of those things, hollows into nothing at all, carving something new within his ghost. As he leaves behind his kids: a young farmer, writer, athlete, and filmmaker, they’re left wondering if  they are those things because they actually like being those things, or because their dad made them so,  Where does ownership begin and origin end? What happens to the people the ghosts leave behind?

These questions boil as Wilson builds so thoroughly to the reunion with their father. Will he retaliate? Bolt? A blow up fight? It’s multifaceted, the zany situation and the cutting depth of all he’s exploring: loneliness, mental health, and the ways family can hurt us. Wilson straddles the line brilliantly between causation and blame, where each character is allowed to feel hurt by the actions of their father, while seeing that maybe it wasn’t about them in the first place. The fiery desire to confront, to raise hell, loses steam, instead sagely uncovering the mental illness that lives within generations of family and the ripple effects in its wake. 

Even after it all, Charles is never really the villain. What happens when they can no longer blame this father figure for their own unhappiness?  Maybe, in their own ways, they can acknowledge that our parents do hurt us, affecting us in very valid and real ways, but, in Mad’s case, we also don’t get to blame them entirely for why we feel lonely as autonomous thirty year olds. There is a time when we get to rewrite our own story.

The wisdom is in the comedown, the hazy feeling of the sun rising on a normal day after such a strange fever dream. The crushing realization that you have to go back to your normal life, while at the same time being so desperate to return to what you know. It is in this liminal space that Mad’s journey of leaving home becomes a homecoming. 

Whether it was Chuck, Chip, Charles or Carl—-perhaps the only thing their father taught them was that over-examination rarely yields desired results. When you enter a story seeking something specific, with a script in mind, it’s never going to be what you wrote in your head. For Mad, Rube, Pep, and Tom, the real version was not without pain, pain that Kevin Wilson brilliantly leaves ambiguous, because there is no magic wand to wave. There is only effort, there is only hope, there is only each other and all of the love they found. There is only the real version of the story that was in no way how they pictured it. It was even better.

FICTION
Run for the Hills
By Kevin Wilson
Ecco
Published May 13, 2025