Edie Kerouac-Parker (1922–1993)

I've never been able to get very far in ON THE ROAD, which I own, and I've never read any other Kerouac books, so I'd hoped to learn something interesting about Jack Kerouac from reading this book by his first wife. I didn't. The best thing I can say about YOU'LL BE OKAY: MY LIFE WITH JACK KEROUAC is that I only paid half price for it. Edie Kerouac-Parker was not a writer. That much is painfully obvious. In fact she writes like someone who probably struggled to finish fifth grade. It's that inane, that simple-minded. What she remembers about her brief marriage to Kerouac in the late 1940s is told mostly in terms of "we went here, we did this, we ate this, we drank that, I was wearing this, he was wearing that, etc." After living together for a time in various seedy apartments in NYC, almost always with other people living there too, Edie married Jack while he was in jail for being a 'material witness' to a sordid murder involving a couple friends. He was released soon after, but they never appear to have had much of a marriage at all, although she tries, in her grade school girl sentences, to make it sound romantic, maybe because it was the most interesting time of her life. They never did have a private place of their own, always living with friends, or his parents in Massachusetts or her mother in Michigan. It was almost as though neither one of them had yet grown up. And although they were both married twice more after their own strange liaison, I'm not sure either one of them ever did grow up.

I did learn that Kerouac was briefly in both the Merchant Marine and the Navy during the war, and, if Edie knows what she's talking about, that he was discharged from the Navy for being "schizoid." But I suspect a real biography would tell me a lot more about this, as well as other obscure aspects of the Beat author's short life. Edie wrote this 'memoir' years after Kerouac died, apparently at the urging of others, like Kerouac's one-time drinking buddy, William Burroughs. Let me just say it was a bad idea. The woman cannot write - at all. I suspect the spelling and grammar was cleaned up by her editors, Tim Moran and Bill Morgan, who published it some years after Edie's death, probably hoping to make a buck.

A much better book is Joyce Johnson's MINOR CHARACTERS memoir of her brief time with Kerouac.

Bottom line: this is a crappy book. Don't buy it. Not even at a discount. And I have even less desire now to read any of Jack Kerouac's work. NOT recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER… (mere)