People have told me that when death comes, it will feel like falling asleep. How they could claim to know this, I have no idea. But if Amie Barrodale’s hilarious and intelligent debut novel, Trip, is to be believed, death is more like an invitation to wake up.
The foot of the Himalayas was once a font of spirituality and philosophy where generations of monks and nuns meditated on life’s most mysterious question—what happens when it ends? Today, these ancient hills host a scholarly conference on “Death and Denouement,” where AI researchers programming “an intelligence that feared death” try to have meaningful dialogue with new age mystics who wear teal berets to prevent demonic possession. Between buffets and powerpoints, there is a game of academic one-upsmanship among the conference presenters, all certain that their schema of the afterlife is superior. Our main character, Sandra, isn’t really in the running. She’s a producer, waiting on her crew to arrive to document the conference, trying not to worry about the eponymous Trip, her 15-year-old autistic son, whom she left at a treatment center back in America. However, Sandra becomes the foremost expert on the subject when she suddenly, unexpectedly, dies.
Neither condemned to hell nor whisked up to heaven, Sandra’s consciousness sits in the bardo—a kind of escape room, your actions in which determine whether you will transcend the cycle of rebirth or get funneled into one of many wombs to do it all over again. This can be a disorienting process, but thankfully one of Sandra’s new acquaintances has a copy of the Tibetan Book of the Dead saved on his phone to guide her. “You should not feel that you have things that you need to finish,” he reads to her corpse. “Instead, look forward to a greater endeavor.” But this is easier read than done. While the bardo is populated by beings meant to test the deceased—deities, bodhisattvas, demons, and hungry spirits (no Lincoln, this time)—none tempt her as much as the son she left behind.
In the bardo, you can recall any memory with perfect clarity and fidelity. These recollections can distract you from achieving nirvana in the same way a memory of a first date telling you it’s “mischievous not mischeevieous,” can distract you from falling asleep. Barrodale characterizes Sandra by showing us what weighs on her after death. Above all, we see her agonize over how she raised her son. Trip transports us vividly to the principals’ and doctors’ offices where Sandra and her ex-husband once negotiated on their son’s behalf. Should they have medicated him? Should they have changed schools? Should they have sent him to that experimental treatment center where the therapists “shoot your kid with water guns” and “put them in body bags”? These scenes, though technically flashbacks, are infused with so much frustrated energy that they practically vibrate. While the demons in the bardo are neutral spirits, the real antagonists in this novel are the psychiatrists, teachers, and administrators who attempt to pigeonhole Trip into either conformity or confinement. Barrodale skewers their self-importance with delight. In one scene, a possessed character is given electroconvulsive therapy against his will. It works after one go, but the presiding psychiatrist flippantly prescribes “Five more rounds. Then we assess. Then perhaps another five rounds.”
In the bardo, you also possess clairvoyance of the present. Soon enough, Sandra turns her all-seeing eyes to Trip and is terrified to find he has fled the treatment center and hitchhiked across the country with Anthony, an erratic man with uncertain motives and an overactive death drive. Sandra’s ability to affect present events is limited, but Trip is not entirely beyond her power. With insight gleaned from powerpoints at the death conference, Sandra races to save her son before he meets her same fate.
This conflict turns the pages, but the deeper question in Trip is not “Can Sandra save her son?” but “Can she learn to let him go?” Jesus famously inverted conventional values when he proclaimed that one must abandon their family to follow him. In this Tibetan cosmology of the afterlife, Sandra must do the same to attain nirvana.
Should you die and find yourself in the Buddhist afterlife, remember that the goal is simple—leave your life behind, and follow the light. Sounds easy enough now, but through the warmth and intensity of the mother-son bond in Trip, Amie Barrodale illustrates why it takes most of us thousands of lifetimes to let go.
FICTION
Trip
By Amie Barrodale
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published September 2, 2025
