Photograph courtesy of Colin Ainsworth.

“I want to wrap / my face tight with a silk scarf and spiral    down /    a Cinque Terre highway in an Alfa Romeo,” writes Olivia Sokolowski in her poem “Lover of Cars,” which appears in the new Fall issue of the Review. And who doesn’t, when you put it like that? In celebration of Sokolowski’s poem, we’ve commissioned writers to reflect briefly on cars they’ve loved, struggled with, coveted, and crushed on.

My parents both worked, and they both made good money, and I needed a car. It all felt very incidental. They had this image in their heads of an ideal weekend—the two of them driving around the Texas Hill Country with a large, iced drink in the cup holder. They’re sitting in the front seats, vintage-by-way-of-long-term-ownership Ray-Bans strapped on tight, and the top is, of course, down. After some searching, they found a fairly cheap used Mercedes-Benz CLK 320—convertible, two doors, soft top, black paint, black interior. They said I could drive it when they didn’t want to, which turned out to be basically every day.

I often forget that this can sound pretty cool. Not only the notion of having a car at sixteen, being able to get around or away if I needed or wanted to, but also that the car was a murdered-out drop top. It is cool to have wheels, especially in Texas. We lived in a suburb outside the Austin city limits, but my parents both grew up in small towns, one in South Texas and the other in the Panhandle. Getting a car, for them, had been the first notion of a kind of promise to leave those small towns. Leaving was, of course, the coolest thing a teenager could do—that great cliché articulated to me when my dad played me Bruce Springsteen songs. My parents saw this car and saw themselves having left, and they saw me in it, years later, as a kind of Ferris Bueller—loud, omniscient, and abjectly capable.

I was very grateful to have a car, but I was not Ferris Bueller. I was not the Fonz. I was not “cool,” per se, though not exactly uncool, either. I never figured out how to explain this properly to my parents—that there was a certain kind of guy who drove this car and that that guy wasn’t me. It would be breaking some news to them. What do you mean our son isn’t the chillest guy at the Episcopal school?

The car was also a clunker. Sensitive, temperamental, like the dog down the block. The black-on-black in a summer drought, a dozen consecutive days of temperatures over 100 degrees, was unbearable. There was no way to air it out: the soft top trapped the heat, but when the top came down, the sun came in. I’d blast the AC for an hour straight and pray that it would still run the next day. A foreign car, too, requires expensive, high-octane gas. This was not ideal.

I have only one photo of myself and this car—a film photo of me and my friend picking up another friend in a nice part of West Austin. There’s a big beautiful white house in the background, the black car in the foreground, top down, and me and my friend in the front seats on a sunny day. I see the photo, with its Tumblr-era look, as a kind of coda to my parents’ vision of that car. It seems to capture a different day, an adjacent reality, one where I hop into the driver’s seat without opening the door, and where I feel less out of place under the vast Texas sun.

Colin Ainsworth is a writer who lives in Brooklyn.

The French Cactus. Photograph by Holly Connolly.

“Okay, fine,” I said, when we saw the price of train tickets from Paris to the wedding we were attending deep in the South of France. “I’ll drive. But we’re getting a Citroën Cactus.” I had not driven in Continental Europe before, and had, by quirk more than anything else, only ever driven a succession of Cactuses; first my mum’s, then a different rental, then, finally, my own.

The Cactus is essentially a four-door, five-seat car, but one of deeply muscular proportions—when I sent a photo of my gray model to a friend who could barely believe that I drive, let alone own, a car, he replied, “It’s, like, a 4×4?” Then there is my favorite feature—unique, as far as I know, to the Cactus—a strip of “Airbumps” lining each side. Said to act as a buffer on collision-prone Parisian streets, they make the car look a little like it’s kitted out in a North Face jacket. Cactuses are not flashy, nor are they known for their reliability. Say the word Citroën to any man who is invested in cars and he will shake his head and start talking about “those French cars and their electrics.” But I have never loved anything because it is functional.

So if I was going to drive for hours on the wrong side of the motorway, I wanted a Cactus. Europcar, however, had other ideas.

“What is this car?” I said, when I saw the word Renault on the rental forms in Europcar’s Charles de Gaulle office. “We selected the Citroën Cactus.”

“Yes,” said the stiff-haired woman behind the counter. “But we have upgraded you. You’ll see: this is a much better car.”

“The key.” She handed me a strange, sleek object that could have come from an Apple Store. There was no metal key attached to it. It was far too light in my hand. “And remember to photograph any scratches that we haven’t marked up.”

Brave face. “It’s the future!” I said, brandishing the keyless key as I returned to Zsófia, who stood with our suitcases outside the office. “We’re looking for row F28.”

“Oh! My mum had this car,” Zsófia said as we arrived at a nondescript white car. “She loved it. It’s a good car.” It looked small—much smaller than the Cactus. Inside, it was worse. We were seated so low down that we’d be looking up at every other car, crammed in tight together; Zsófia’s knee was touching the gear stick.

There was no ignition. Of course there wasn’t, because there was no key. So then what.

There were many buttons. One, apart from the others, read “Engine Start Stop.” Was that it? Start the car by pressing a button? Slowly, very slowly, I pressed it. Nothing. It was like sitting in one of those coin-operated rides for children they have in shopping centers, but you’ve run out of money.

“I’ll call my mum and ask how hers worked,” said Zsófia. The phone started ringing, she was put on speaker—the connection was terrible. “The clutch?” Zsófia was saying. “The button and what with the clutch?” I felt really hot. I started trying to get the windows down. “How the fuck do you even move the mirrors in this thing?”

I know now that all I had to do was hold down the clutch, then press the on button and the car would start. But this felt too illogical to even bother to try: How would it know I was pressing the clutch before it was even turned on?

“No,” I said. “It’s too much. This is all too much. This is not a real car.”

Once, driving back to the airport at the end of a family holiday, my dad pulled over onto the hard shoulder of the Spanish motorway and, screaming all the while, threw a suitcase full of John Grisham novels into a field. I felt like that. “Zsófia,” I said. I was trying not to catch sight of myself in the rearview mirror. “Let’s take the suitcases out of the boot.”

I marched back to the office, straight to the front of the queue—“It’s urgent”—and slammed the fake key down on the counter. “I saw a Cactus in the parking lot,” I said. “Give it to me.” The woman looked up. We had been awake since 4 A.M. I did not look nice. “Of course,” she said. “One moment.” Ten minutes later, driving out of the parking lot high up behind the wheel of my Cactus, I was Thelma and Louise. I was ready. I was home.

Driving, as anyone will tell you, is about muscle memory. It is also about overriding your own fear of the car’s capacity to kill, until being at the wheel becomes something maybe like the thrill of holding a loaded gun. Or it is for me, at least. I was taught to drive twice. First at nineteen, then again at twenty-seven, both times by a sturdy County Tyrone man called Jim. I felt younger the second time. Timid and illegal in the driver’s seat and horribly aware that it was I and only I who was operating thousands of pounds of steel and aluminum—that I was responsible for everything that happened.

When it clicked, and I can’t explain it any better than that—it was a thing that happened overnight—there was nothing like the sheer feeling of control. The meditative gravity. Very few things that I do in my life have any real stakes; driving is one. But for me, for the magic to work, there needs to be a certain symbiosis with your car: you have to trust it. And so I got in my Cactus.

Later, after we had gotten a flat tire and the only mechanic within an hour’s drive still open in rural France at 6 P.M. on a Friday had taken pity on us and offered to change it for free, I texted my brother a photo of the Cactus being repaired. He wrote back: “Do you have some sponsorship deal with citroen cactus haha.”

Holly Connolly is a writer based in London and Belfast.

Screenshot from “2011 Subaru Outlack AWD (Walkthrough).”

My mom liked to call the color, half-endearingly, “baby-shit brown.” I’m told Subaru manufactured vehicles in that particular color for only one year, 2011. The biggest Outback model—far from cute. I wouldn’t say that I lived out of it, though that’s not too far off. I was in college at the time, and my living situation consisted of sleeping on a three-season porch in Colorado Springs. I bought the car in Boston, the summer before my junior year, and threw a futon mattress in the back. By the time I got to my porch, I kept as many clothes in my room as I did in the back of the car. Wherever I slept, the temperature was always the same inside as out, and most mornings I was drowning in high-altitude sunshine.

It was a dirty car. If I was with friends and we stepped out of a bar and saw a dumpster in the parking lot, someone would say, “Look, it’s the passenger seat of K’s car.” Lots of laughs. Once, driving from Colorado Springs to Moab, Utah, half the rear bumper released itself from the frame. I could see it waving through the back windshield like a shit-brown flag against the canyons and red dust. I kept promising to plastic-weld the bumper back together, but a Frankenstein-like stitch job with black tape did the job well enough. As they say: duct tape will fix anything but a broken heart. My friends took to calling the car “Dirty Gerty,” with a flair for rhyme. Why Gertrude? Who knows.

The beginning of the end for Gerty came at high speed. It’s not as frightening as that might sound. Visiting home after graduation, near Boston, I was doing eighty on Route 2 when the car stalled. I pulled over to the side of the road and got it started again. On a side street, after I came to a complete stop, the engine stalled again. It was an automatic. By the time I got it to a garage, I was basically keeping a hand, twist-ready, on the key in the ignition. Blown transmission, not worth replacing, considering the condition of the car. After three years, close to a hundred thousand miles, and nights spent in at least half of the lower 48 (MA, VT, ME, NH, RI, NY, PA, MD, VA, OH, IL, IN, IA, ID, MI, MN, MO, KS, NE, CO, UT, AZ, NM, CA, OR, WA) and five Canadian provinces (NB, NS, ON, PE, QC), I donated Gerty to charity.

Because it was a limited model-color run, I don’t see too many Gertys out on the roads. I saw one this morning. In my chest, I felt that familiar flip, my foot pressing the pedal to the floor, climbing something steep, looking over at a friend, Max or Rowan, Fiona or Hollis, with a sea of cans and coffee mugs at their feet.

BMW of Mountain View Geniuses, “Tour the 2023 M4 Competition xDrive Convertible in Alpine White | 4K.”

“I want to wrap / my face tight with a silk scarf and spiral    down /    a Cinque Terre highway in an Alfa Romeo,” writes Olivia Sokolowski in her poem “Lover of Cars,” which appears in the new Fall issue of the Review. And who doesn’t, when you put it like that? In celebration of Sokolowski’s poem, we’ve commissioned writers to reflect briefly on cars they’ve loved, struggled with, coveted, and crushed on.

I am not only a horrible driver but also a very confident one. I’ve never owned a car. I shouldn’t. Yet I’ve got an unaccountable and unyielding desire for a vehicle I’m not sure I’ve ever even seen. I want—have always wanted, with an impractical seriousness that astounds me—an Alpine White BMW M4 two-seater convertible with a perforated Fiona Red leather interior.

I can’t help myself. I want to get inside one so bad, and I want to ride it so slow, and I want to ride it fast, and I want to feel my feet thrill at being suspended only 120 mm above ground, at the threat of my toes being shredded into pavement. I want to park it and feel the brutal throb of my revving. I want to feel the car’s restraint, for to drive it at all is to tame it—it’s to feel 503 horses latent in the softest touch of gas.

Other cars can go faster. But these other cars look like small men who have taken too much testosterone. They do not come equipped with the M4’s elegant and low-sloping front-fender curvature. They do not have the same sleek steel-plated jaw directing the eye to the upper cusp of each tire. They are too souped-up. They are vehicles with aerodynamics. My M4 is aerodynamism.

As for the color scheme: why the white exterior and red interior? I don’t know. Japan? Peru? Candy cane? Mint? Fresh! Elegance!

While I dismiss other sports cars, I know that other vehicles—standard, medium-speed ones—have their appeal. They have their romance. I’ve experienced such things—I even went so far as to lose half my virginity in the back of a Jeep (a Wrangler befit with a busted passenger side door, a trunk full of old medical equipment, a sagging left-side tire, and a battery prone to failure, so prone in fact that one night it failed in the vacant parking lot of an Armenian church, which, incidentally, was when and where the partial deflowering took place, anyway). I could have developed hatchback attachments. Or gotten into salvaged cars—my great-grandfather ran a used-car junkyard, through which my grandfather and later my father paraded, climbing over engines, retrofitting fenders.

But all of that is behind me. Now I just want this one nice, perfect thing. No matter I’ve never seen one, no matter I’ll never afford one, no matter I should never drive one. I know you now, and maybe you know someone, who maybe possibly knows someone, who possibly knows or has heard of someone, who doesn’t have to let me drive their beautiful specimen, but who at the very least can take me for a ride.

Sophie Madeline Dess’s debut novel, Dead Center, will be published by Penguin Press in 2025. Her story “Zalmanovs” appears in issue no. 242 of the Review.