Baby Driver [Hardcover]

Jan Kerouac (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1981

Just as Jack Kerouac captured the beat of the '50s, his daughter captured the rhythm of the generation that followed. With a graceful, often disturbing detachment and a spellbinding gift for descriptive imagery, Jan Kerouac explores the tortured, freewheeling soul of a woman on her own road. From an adolescence of LSD, detention homes, probation, pregnancy, and a stillbirth in the Mexican tropics at age 15; to the peace movement in Haight-Ashbury and Washington state; to traveling by bus through Central America with a madman for a lover, Baby Driver moves with the force of a tropical storm.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; 1st edition (September 1981)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312063768
• ISBN-13: 978-0312063764
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,017,942 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars one of the greatest semi-autobiographical books ever written, October 1, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Baby Driver: A Story About Myself (Paperback)

Jan Kerouac, to me filled a void with her book that had always been left after having read her fathers work. I was able to appriciate Baby Driver not just as an enjoyable read but also really relate to to it. Comparisons to Jack Kerouac aside, the engrossing story and the unique way in which Ms.Kerouac presented the sequence of events in her life as the events and not as the "sequence" were what made me love this book. My own copy of this book is in horrible repair, the cover taped together, pages still glued to one another in various sized clumps yet none of the clumps are actually attached to the cover itself any more. I've been looking for a new copy for years. Even the City Lights bookstore failed to turn up anything. While the old jacket cover was more endearing I'm looking forward to a new copy, so that I can once again share this book with friends. As is usually the case with the works of so many other women writers, this book has been unnoticed by most, yet is greatly enjoyed by the few of us lucky enough to stumble on to it.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars "A story about myself", July 6, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Baby Driver: A Story About Myself (Paperback)

Reading BABY DRIVER allows the reader to feel close to this abandoned daughter, who, in spite of all hardships, moved constantly forward through life. Her foundation was her mother, Joan Haverty, her brother, David, and her husband, John Lash. These three people loved Jan for being Jan, not because she was Jack Kerouac's daughter. And although she imitated her father--consciously or subconsciously--this is her "story about myself." Her decision not to focus upon her famous father creates a sense that is palpable, that while Jack went about his life, focusing constantly on himself through introspection and self-destruction, Jan went about hers with love, searching, and optimism. Her voice is often naive, and therefore, revealing of the pain she could not see or admit to. She never expresses the anger she feels too deeply to touch, instead seeking danger, excesses, and adventure. In the end, she always has the three most important people in her life to return to, and they always, always accept her unconditionally. Looking past her forays into prostitution, drugs and petty crime, a portrait emerges of a brave, determined person, capable of love, but with a big hole in her own life that was never filled by an abandoning father.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Chaotic lyrical coming of age story, September 19, 2006

By 

Eileen P. Gardner (Chicago, Illinois) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Baby Driver: A Story About Myself (Paperback)

Jan Kerouac, Jack Kerouac's only child grew up in a chaotic, nomadic childhood that swept her from the poverty-stricken tenements of Lower East Side New York to blissful shores of a tiny Mexican village. Intelligent, articulate and restlest, Kerouac was already unconsciously emulating her famous father's boozy itinerant lifestyle when she began dropping acid at the age of 12. By fifteen, pregnant by an ex-boyfriend and on the run from juvenile authorities intent upon locking her up, Jan Kerouac set out on a remarkable journey of self-discovery that she chronicles in this beautiful, absorbing memoir. This 10-year odyssey meanders from New York City to Sante Fe with side rips to Mexico, Guatemala, Columbia and Peru. Along the way, Jan introduces the reader to a motley assortment of characters including philosophical junkies, a vengeful witch, a matter of fact part time hooker and her schizophrenic Argentinean lvoer, Miguel, who hears murderous voices in his head urging him to kill her. Although this was Kerouac's first book, she was already a mesmerizing storyteller fearlessly exposing her flaws, bad choices and mistakes while somehow maintaining her dignity and sense of humor in the worst situations including a stint as a prostitute. Jan is also a very sensual writer whose lyrical prose vividly evokes the sights, sounds and smells of her settings. "After a spell, one of our favorite creatures came out to intertain us. The Fred Astaire spider, we called him. He was a brilliant orandge with a large pad on the end of each foot -- they loooked like actual shoes. Right into the pool of lamplight on the floor he would leap take a sort of bow, putting four of his legs together on one side and then lean over. Then the spider would do the most frenzied, intricate footwork, twisting, hopping, kicking with just one leg, then another." "Baby Driver" captures perfectly the drug infused, delirious beauty of a time when finding yourself meant hitting the road to seek adventure and experience life at its most intense and chaotic.