Our newest title from the Trampoline Press author lineup is Finding the Road Rebels. Debut memoirist Doreen Frances shares a tender, twisting story of unraveling a family secret. Who was the father that she never met? It’s a book that shows the road to finding the truth about how a daughter discovered the man who died in a hot rod wreck when she was only a year old.
“Fathers matter, even if we never know them,” says Andra Watkins, New York Times bestselling author of Not Without My Father: One Woman’s 444-Mile Walk of the Natchez Trace. “With grace, determination, and grit, Doreen Frances undertakes an epic journey to understand her birth father. In the process, she finds herself. An ode to fathers and daughters everywhere.”
Frances is a Massachusetts-based storyteller whose work explores identity, memory, and the truths we often discover later in life. With a deep connection to history and nostalgia, she writes with honesty and care, attentive to the details that shape who we become.
Available for pre-order at Bookshop and Amazon, the story began on October 30, 1966. A young Medford man named Paul Grasso was killed when his ’33 Ford coupe left Massachusetts Route 93 and crashed into a house. Rumors followed the spectacular wreck. No clear answers did. Few people knew he had fathered a baby girl.
Doreen grew up with a dad-but not with the truth. Her biological father had denied her paternity and kept her existence hidden from his family. After his death, his name surfaced only in fragments. Stories shifted depending on who was telling them. Questions about the crash lingered, but the details never fully aligned. Decades later, when Paul was erased from his own mother’s eulogy, Doreen reached her limit. Determined to understand the man who had refused to claim her-and the night that ended his life-she set out to find the Road Rebels, the teenage hot rod club he founded in the late 1950s.
An online post led her into the working-class world her father once called home: garages, drag strips, long-held friendships, and memories shaped by time. As she pieced together accounts from the men who knew him best, she began to see not only who her father had been, but how growing up as a secret, unknown to so many who remembered him, had followed her into adulthood.
Ron Stempkowski, author of The Luck We Carry: Love, Loss, and the Stories That Shape Us, says, “Finding the Road Rebels is what happens when a natural-born reporter turns her skills on the story she was never supposed to know. Doreen Frances chases her father the way the best journalists chase the truth: patiently, doggedly, and without flinching. This book will stay with you.”
Joel Ian Deichmann, author of Passion for Place: Embracing Global Wanderlust, says the memoir is an exhilarating read from cover to cover.
“Doreen takes readers on a creative and persistent search to learn who her father was on the night he died. Her journey is adorned with musical undertones and visions of hot rod cars, defying heartbreak to find friendship and companionship. Hurdles set by the passage of time, and family members who would prefer to conceal the truth, are no match for the author’s cool persistence.”
The book is available through regional and national booksellers, online outlets, and can be requested through libraries. Frances will tour hot rod shows around the US in support of the release starting in 2027.