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Baby Driver

Baby Driver

A Story About Myself

by Jan Kerouac, introduction by Amanda Fortini

$17.95
$17.95
American Literature Available as E-Book Fiction
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“Was it January or February? The coconut fronds waving, shining like green hair in the sun, gave no clue.” Fifteen-year-old Jan is pregnant, gamely living off rice and whatever fish her boyfriend John can catch in Yelapa, Mexico. She and John, who introduced her to Beckett, Kafka, Joyce, and Dostoevsky, are writing a novel together. Before she can leave for Guadalajara where she plans to deliver her baby, she goes into labor three months early, and the baby is stillborn. She turns sixteen soon after and decides to head north.

Jan Kerouac, the only child of Jack Kerouac and Joan Haverty Kerouac, published her autobiographical novel Baby Driver in 1981. Unacknowledged by her father, she is haunted by the absence of his love. With a graceful, sometimes disturbing detachment and intense lyricism, she explores the freewheeling soul of a woman on her own road.

From an adolescence on the Lower East Side of Manhattan dropping LSD and doing time in detention homes, to the peace movement in Haight-Ashbury and Washington state, to traveling by bus through Central America with a madman for a lover, Jan lives by her wits and whims, rhapsodic and irrepressible.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781681379739
Pages: 224
Publication Date:

Praise

If [Jack] Kerouac sometimes put a spiritual gloss on poverty and life on the edge, his daughter offered an unflinching vision.
—The Guardian

By this imitative magic, Jan Kerouac hopes to move in the company of her father—not, I think, to rival him in letters, but to bring him back.
—Carolyn See, Los Angeles Times

A full-fledged writer on the brink, nearly mad, in search of something she still has yet to name.... In spite of her pain, Kerouac is obsessed with the need to look, to experience, to pierce beyond the surface and understand all that flashes there.... Kerouac writes in a style that is vivid, absorbing, unpretentious. She steers clear of vain and maudlin tones by attacking her ordeals with honesty and clarity.
—San Francisco Examiner

What’s rolled out in this ‘autobiographical novel’ is Jan’s childhood on the Lower East Side with gritty, hard-pressed mom Joan, and then her fast track into the 1960s demimonde: drugs, petty theft, drugs, Bellevue, drugs, juvenile detention centers, drugs. An older Jan in her twenties is also aired: commune life in New Mexico; working as a hooker; being a heroin-shooter; peyote session; a South American odyssey in the company of a scary psychopath.
—Publishers Weekly

There is also something endearing and brave about her frenetic, passionate capacity for experience.... Kerouac is a sharp observer (especially of men, with whom she is particularly experienced). At her best, she can be funny, wise and occasionally poetic ... that’s the sign of a good traveler, and the sign of a good writer about to travel, too: namely, the ability not simply to look, but to see, and to find mystery in small things as well as large ones.
—Madamoiselle

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