You'll Be Okay: My Life With Jack Kerouac, Edie Kerouac-Parker, City Lights Press, September 2007
" ... Kerouac-Parker’s strength lies in showing these characters as ordinary men instead of ‘mythic’ writers—which rings especially true in her descriptions of Kerouac. Rarely does the reader get a glimpse of Kerouac at his typewriter or hard at work on a story. Instead, she focuses on the memories of her and Jack out to dinner with friends or walking together in the park with their dog, Woof-it. She let’s intimate details subtlety slip into the text to let the reader experience the closeness they shared as a couple —how “his skin was salty, his body odorless” when they made love, how he read Shakespeare and The Bible in the bathroom, how he fell for her after she ate five hot dogs in a deli. She describes it all with precise feminine detail and the audience gets to see a Kerouac through the wide eyes of a woman who loved him before alcohol and drug abuse afflicted him in later years.
" ... Kerouac-Parker’s strength lies in showing these characters as ordinary men instead of ‘mythic’ writers—which rings especially true in her descriptions of Kerouac. Rarely does the reader get a glimpse of Kerouac at his typewriter or hard at work on a story. Instead, she focuses on the memories of her and Jack out to dinner with friends or walking together in the park with their dog, Woof-it. She let’s intimate details subtlety slip into the text to let the reader experience the closeness they shared as a couple —how “his skin was salty, his body odorless” when they made love, how he read Shakespeare and The Bible in the bathroom, how he fell for her after she ate five hot dogs in a deli. She describes it all with precise feminine detail and the audience gets to see a Kerouac through the wide eyes of a woman who loved him before alcohol and drug abuse afflicted him in later years.
Edie’s affection for Kerouac borders, at times, on desperation and denial. She explains how Kerouac and Neal Cassidy (the real-life Dean Moriarty of On the Road) would come to visit her in Detroit and ask her for money (“If possible, I was generous, knowing it would keep them coming back to Grosse Pointe to see me”). Her devotion to him would be pathetic (“…I dreamed about his success. All of my wishes had been for him”) if it weren’t so real. The reader, instead of feeling sorry for Edie, understands that she was a woman with immense strength and that her relationship and love for Kerouac was a decisive personal choice. ... "
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