You’ll Be Okay: My Life With Jack Kerouac

Those who read only the best-known works of the Beat Generation—Ginsberg’s Howl, Kerouac’s On the Road, Burroughs’s Naked Lunch—will be forgiven for thinking that the Beats were a misogynistic lot: women, when they appeared at all, were cast in minor roles, and it is only in recent years that we have begun to hear their side of the story. You’ll Be Okay: My Life With Jack Kerouac (City Lights) is Edie Parker-Kerouac’s account of her marriage to Jack Kerouac, and though the marriage only lasted from 1944 to 1946, it is clear that those two years came to represent a lost, golden period in her life. Written much later than the events described and published posthumously (Parker-Kerouac died in 1993 from congestive heart failure), the account is deeply nostalgic and rich in detail, and it gives a vivid sense of what it was like to be a headstrong young woman in love with a budding author, both of them trying to make it big in Manhattan during the 1940s.