Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir

Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir
by Joyce Johnson

Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir
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Book Summary Information

Author: Joyce Johnson
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1999-07-01
ISBN: 0140283579
Number of pages: 304
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)

Book Reviews of Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir

Book Review: Read it for Joyce, not just Jack
Summary: 5 Stars

Joyce Johnson's memoir of emerging from an overprotected childhood and landing at the center of the Beat movement in the 1950's is a delight whether you choose to read it for its portrait of Jack Kerouac, for the world that was, or for the inner journey it reveals. It is a fine literary performance. Johnson plays with tense and perspective as if they form a telescopic lens sliding the past out of a fuzzy black and white still photograph into a vivid, colorful present. There is a suspenseful tension to the book from which flows a novelistic structure, never, though, at the expense of truth. Johnson gets down like no one else how it is to carry around that overprotected childhood, to always feel that you could be missing something, that the center has yet to be achieved. Her inner struggle matches the themes of the Beats who are seeking the pure experience of being through their music, their talk, their drugs and alcohol, their lovemaking, their travels and their poetry. She nails the paradox of a quarry that can never sit still, whether it is a person, like Kerouac, or her friend and guide into the Beat world, Elise Cowen, both of whom eventually disappear into their demons. She captures the loss of balance when counterculture is encroached upon by the mainstream. She manages to convey all this without telling, just through showing the events of her life. Johnson is wry but never bitter, she takes full responsibility for her own choices and actions. This is a book that invites the reader to share the wonder that this was all, indeed, real.

Summary of Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir

Jack Kerouac. Allen Ginsberg. William S. Burroughs. LeRoi Jones. Theirs are the names primarily associated with the Beat Generation. But what about Joyce Johnson (nee Glassman), Edie Parker, Elise Cowen, Diane Di Prima, and dozens of others? These female friends and lovers of the famous iconoclasts are now beginning to be recognized for their own roles in forging the Beat movement and for their daring attempts to live as freely as did the men in their circle a decade before Women's Liberation. Twenty-one-year-old Joyce Johnson, an aspiring novelist and a secretary at a New York literary agency, fell in love with Jack Kerouac on a blind date arranged by Allen Ginsberg nine months before the publication of On the Road made Kerouac an instant celebrity. While Kerouac traveled to Tangiers, San Francisco, and Mexico City, Johnson roamed the streets of the East Village, where she found herself in the midst of the cultural revolution the Beats had created. Minor Characters portrays the turbulent years of her relationship with Kerouac with extraordinary wit and love and a cool, critical eye, introducing the reader to a lesser known but purely original American voice: her own.

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