A darkly funny, nerve‑shredding true story of what happens when a promise, a plane ticket and a mother’s love collide with gun‑belt America. 

Lewis is thirteen, autistic, tall, too smart, too online, and has exactly one dream: to cross the world from suburban Sydney to a nowhere town in Arizona and finally meet his online best friend, Lola. 

After a disastrous Halloween leaves him shattered, his mother blurts the words that will upend both their lives: “Let’s just bloody go.” Within weeks, she has maxed the cards, stopped paying bills, cashed in coins at the bank and booked two business‑class seats they absolutely cannot afford. It’s a once‑in‑a‑lifetime home‑school “excursion”… or the worst parenting decision she will ever make. 

On paper, Lola’s family sound ordinary enough. In reality, they arrive at the resort in a beat‑up truck, daughters in tow, dad in a leather vest with two loaded guns on his body and 800 rounds on his hip, and a smiling young mother with no teeth and a life story that reads like a crime dossier. The welcome lunch costs more than a month’s rent. 

Outside, the desert waits. Inside, every red flag is frantically rationalised away by a woman who has staked her son’s heart—and their last dollars—on a fantasy being real. 

What follows is a high‑stakes plunge into the underbelly of the American “Wild West”: gun ranges beside schools, Walmart sheriffs, border‑wall stories where bodies are collected weekly, gun shows next to quilt shows, and a rural family whose chaos, poverty and tenderness are as confronting as their firepower. 

As Lewis falls hard for Lola in real life, his mother must navigate culture shock, class shock, gun culture, and her own terror, while pretending to everyone; especially her son, that everything is fine. 

Told in a breathless, profane, brutally honest voice, WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE is not an inspirational autism memoir, a parenting manual, or a political lecture. It’s a dark comedy travel memoir about love as a bad‑decision engine: one woman’s desperate attempt to give her neurodivergent child the connection he craves, in a country where everyone seems armed and no one seems safe. 

Along the way, she skewers herself as much as anyone else—her impulsiveness, her money mess, her fantasies of being the “good” mother—inviting readers to sit in the discomfort of what we do for our kids when logic and fear say turn back. 

For fans of Jenny Lawson, Samantha Irby, Louis Theroux and anyone who loves their nonfiction wild, voice‑driven and a bit unhinged, this is a “you won’t believe this actually happened” memoir about parenting on the edge, online love made dangerously real, and the thin line between adventure and disaster.