Motel Nirvana: Dreaming of the New Age in the American Desert Book

In the spring of 1993, as religious fundamentalism swept the world over, Melanie McGrath found herself beginning a journey through the southwestern desert states in search of an American dream of the spirit. A British woman traveling through New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado, she spent two seasons meeting UFOlogists, inner children, conspiracy theorists, aliens, tree-huggers, angels, and immortals, people who had escaped across the last great American frontier - into the inner self. On a journey of some thirteen thousand miles, Melanie McGrath meets a Jesus channeler, camps out at love-ins, and stays in a house owned by a family of aliens from the Pleiades. In a luxury hotel in Arizona, she comes upon an Italian prince who thinks he will never die. The further she becomes entangled in the banality, poignancy, expectations, and downright weirdness of New Age culture, the further her presumptions about the reasons for her journey begin to crumble, until she is forced finally to confront her own spiritual disenchantment.