Chick Flick Road Kill: A Behind-the-Scenes Odyssey into Movie-Made America is the nonfiction story of a young woman's travel along the United States' popular culture landmarks. A twenty-something weaned on television and raised by movies and music videos, author Alicia Rebensdorf goes to the backdrops of Deliverance to Twin Peaks, Cheers to Fargo, searching for the country beyond its movie image.

In taking this journey, the author explores her relationship to popular culture, media mythology and how deeply, despite her better judgment, romantic notions pervade her subconscious.

It's easy, after all, to dismiss movies and TV as fantasy. To pooh-pooh its over-sexed storylines, its very special episodes, even its nostalgic road trip cliches. But seeing roads and places familiar to the author only through that medium and comparing them to the images that made them famous prove more complicated than just real and unreal. Latent expectations, self-consciousness and the logistics of being a single girl on the road interfere. Rebensdorf's notions of authenticity are called into question and her media savvy provides less armor than she imagines.

A cross-country romp and a meditation on media, Chick Flick Road Kill is a both a story of our culture's life-long affair with Hollywood's Americana and an intimate encounter with the land beyond it.