Marissa Stapley’s most recent novel is The Lightning Bottles. The adaption of her novel Lucky will stream on Apple TV in 2026.

Into Giants by Patrick Watson was playing as I waited nervously at the intersection, my teenage daughter sitting in the passenger seat. The song was part of a seven-hour long “Driving Music” playlist I’d recently made – no matter that I hadn’t even yet managed to drive around the block by myself. I turned our Toyota Highlander and accelerated as the melody swelled. If you’ve heard the song, you know the moment I mean: it’s the part that lifts and lifts until it feels like the soundtrack to your own life, but only if you’d done something extraordinary. Which I just had, by managing to turn left without having a panic attack.

This was, somehow, a triumph more than 30 years in the making.

At 16, I was too busy riding shotgun in my boyfriend’s red sports car to bother getting a driver’s licence of my own. He would wash that car with reverence and we’d drive from Stouffville to Wasaga Beach. Once, while sitting on the trunk looking out at Lake Huron, I idly ran a sand-covered foot across the bumper and left behind a constellation of scratches. I think the fight that caused was the beginning of the end for us, but instead of getting my licence after we broke up, I moved to Toronto to live with my mom. With the subway so close, I had a new reason not to learn to drive.

Years later, when I was pregnant with our first child, my husband – rightly envisioning years of ferrying the kids to practices and lessons, with me still riding shotgun – tried to teach me on his Volkswagen, which had a manual transmission. My belly got in the way of the stick shift, our bickering bordered on catastrophic, and eventually I gave up and focused on motherhood and writing. Then came the years of strollers, toddlers, car seats, and dependence, on my husband, my parents, kind friends who shuttled me and my children around Toronto.

I want you to know I wasn’t complacent about this. I tried to get my licence a few times. I took lessons, I failed tests. Soon, it became a funny story I’d tell at dinner parties. There was the time a friend thought maybe if I took half a Xanax, I might be less nervous during my test. (Do not recommend. Likely illegal.) The time I failed a test in January and my instructor at the time was so incensed that I had taken him out of the running for the pool he’d organized with the other instructors to see who could go the furthest into the new year without a failed student that he refused to speak to me on the drive home. The time, mid-test, when the examiner asked me to complete a turn at a light “when it was safe to do so” and my nerves caused me to miss that last part. I immediately crossed two lanes of traffic without so much as checking my blind spot; she then asked me to pull over so she could drive us back to the DMV.

But also, there were the stories I didn’t like to tell. Like when I panicked and........

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