9781915368416

23/10/25

PB

352 pages

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 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.

Jan Kerouac (1952–1996) was the only daughter of Jack Kerouac and the author of the autobiographical novels Baby Driver, Trainsong, and Parrot Fever.