You'll Be Okay: My Life with Jack Kerouac

by Edie Kerouac-Parker

Overview

"You have a unique viewpoint from which to write about Jack as no one else has or could write. I feel very deeply that this book must be written. And no one else, I repeat, can write it."—William S. Burroughs

Edie Parker was eighteen years old when she met Jack Kerouac at Columbia Universityin 1940. A young socialite from Grosse Pointe, Michigan, she had come to New York to study art, and quickly found herself swept up in the excitement and new freedoms that the big city offered a sheltered young woman of that time.

Jack Kerouac was also eighteen, attending Columbia on a football scholarship, impressing his friends with his intelligence and knowledge of literature. Introduced by a mutual friend, Jack and Edie fell in love and quickly moved in together, sharing an apartment with Joan Adams (who would later marry William S. Burroughs). This is the story of their life together in New York, where they began lifetime friendships with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and others. Edie’s memoir provides the only female voice from that nascent period, when the leading members of the Beat Generation were first meeting and becoming friends.

In the end, Jack and Edie went their separate ways, keeping in touch only on rare occasions through letters and late-night phone calls. In his last letter to Edie, written a month before his death, Kerouac ended it with the encouraging phrase: "You’ll be okay." It was from that note that the title of this book was taken.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780872864641
Publisher:	City Lights Books
Publication date:	09/01/2007
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	15 - 18 Years

About the Author

Edie Parker was the first wife of Jack Kerouac. A writer and painter who lived with Kerouac for four years, her role in the community was crucial to the development of the early Beat Generation. She introduced Kerouac to Lucien Carr, who was quickly followed by Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs.

What People are Saying About This

Paul Maher Jr.

"A must-read about a much neglected saga of the legendary iconic Kerouac."--(Paul Maher Jr., author of Jack Kerouac's American Journey)

Andrei Codrescu

"In these pages we meet the young genius of just before 'On the Road,' adored by all and loved by her most of all."--(Andrei Codrescu, author of Wakefield)

Editorial Reviews

"Sad and funny, full of pathos and the lost dreams of youth, 'You'll Be Okay' will find it's way to the short list of exceptional books by women of the Beat Generation that includes Carolyn Cassady's 'Off the Road' and Joyce Johnson's 'Minor Characters.' This year, on the 50th anniversary of the publication of 'On the Road,' readers may well want to turn to Edie's long-overdue memoir for one woman's soulful view of Kerouac, Carr, Ginsberg and Burroughs, whom she knew intimately and describes in her own inimitable style." – Jonah Raskin, The San Francisco Chronicle

"Kerouac's first wife, Edie Parker, played a pivotal role in his literary evolution, but her side of the story hasn't been fully known until now. . . . Fascinating in her own right, and writing with compelling lucidity and soulful sweetness, Parker vividly recalls her posh childhood, life in Queens with Kerouac and his parents . . . she provides a rare female perspective on the notoriously misogynistic Beat enclave. "—Booklist, Starred Review

"A quirky and poignant addition to the Beat lore and 'memory' by a woman who lived it."—Anne Waldman, The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics

"This is a wonderful memoir of a girl in love. When she wrote it, Edie Frankie Parker was no longer a girl, and her love, Jack Kerouac, was long gone. But Edie, or Frankie as her intimates called her, remembered everything about her brief marriage to Jack, as if a bubble of resilient sunshine had encapsulated those few years during World War 2, and kept intact every detail. She remembers what they ate, what they wore, what movies they saw. Her Jack Kerouac was young, handsome, a lover of fun, and a would-be writer. He stayed so in her memory and though she alludes occasionally to the alcoholic monster that emerged in later years, that creature doesn't live here. In these pages we meet the young genius of just before On the Road, adored by all and loved by her most of all. The flavor of the war years with all their privations and mad hopes wafts from these pages freshly, like an Atlantic breeze, and makes one wonder, finally, what might have happened if Jack had settled down with Frankie, instead of following the turbulent destiny that changed America."—Andrei Codrescu, author of Wakefield

"Edie Kerouac-Parker's long-delayed post-humous memoir clears up much of the myth-making and 'made-up facts' about this tumultuous, but seminal relationship between herself and ex-husband Jack Kerouac. She was there at the first meeting between the Beats, she knew Jack Kerouac as an ambitious, reckless driven writer searching to make a name for himself in the big city. Honest, poignant, humorous, this book is a must-read about a much-neglected saga of the legendary iconic Kerouac."—Paul Maher Jr., author of Jack Kerouac's American Journey: The Real-Life Odyssey of On the Road

"A must-read about a much neglected saga of the legendary iconic Kerouac."—Paul Maher Jr., author of Jack Kerouac's American Journey

"A quirky and poignant addition to the Beat lore."—Anne Waldman, The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics

"An in depth retelling of the story from Edie's perspective . . . it will add to our knowledge of Kerouac's life."—Brian Dalton, Beat Scene

"In these pages we meet the young genius of just before On the Road, adored by all and loved by her most of all."—Andrei Codrescu, author of Wakefield

"Sad and funny, full of pathos and the lost dreams of youth."—Jonah Raskin, The San Francisco Chronicle

"She also had a front-row seat for the previews of the Sal-and-Dean show, which became the heart of 'On the Road.'"—Newsweek, August 13, 2007

"We've officially entered what might as well be called Jack Kerouac Awareness Month. . . . and the commemorations include . . . a memoir, You'll Be Okay, from Kerouac's first wife."—New York Times "Papercuts" blog, August 8, 2007

"[T]he posthumous memoir by Kerouac's first wife, joins more than a dozen memoirs and biographies about Kerouac published since his death at 47 in 1969."—USA Today, August 21, 2007

"[T]his book offers a fresh look at Kerouac as husband and lover as well as a new chapter on the role of women in the Beat Generation. Highly Recommended."—Library Journal, September 15th, 2007

"Those who read only the best-known works of the Beat Generation—Ginsberg's Howl, Kerouac's On the Road, Burroughs's Naked Lunch—will be forgiven for thinking that the Beats were a misogynistic lot: women, when they appeared at all, were cast in minor roles, and it is only in recent years that we have begun to hear their side of the story. You'll Be Okay: My Life With Jack Kerouac is Edie Kerouac-Parker's account of her marriage to Jack Kerouac, and though the marriage only lasted from 1944 to 1946, it is clear that those two years came to represent a lost, golden period in her life. Written much later than the events described and published posthumously. . . the account is deeply nostalgic and rich in detail, and it gives a vivid sense of what it was like to be a headstrong young woman in love with a budding author, both of them trying to make it big in Manhattan during the 1940s."—Michael Hayward, Geist Magazine

From the Publisher

An in depth retelling of the story from Edie's perspective...it will add to our knowledge of Kerouac's life.
—Brian Dalton

Beat Scene

Those who read only the best-known works of the Beat Generation-Ginsberg's Howl, Kerouac's On the Road, Burroughs's Naked Lunch-will be forgiven for thinking that the Beats were a misogynistic lot: women, when they appeared at all, were cast in minor roles, and it is only in recent years that we have begun to hear their side of the story. You'll Be Okay: My Life With Jack Kerouac is Edie Kerouac-Parker's account of her marriage to Jack Kerouac, and though the marriage only lasted from 1944 to 1946, it is clear that those two years came to represent a lost, golden period in her life. Written much later than the events described and published posthumously. . . the account is deeply nostalgic and rich in detail, and it gives a vivid sense of what it was like to be a headstrong young woman in love with a budding author, both of them trying to make it big in Manhattan during the 1940s.
—Michael Hayward

Geist Magazine

She also had a front-row seat for the previews of the Sal-and-Dean show, which became the heart of 'On the Road.'

Newsweek

Sad and funny, full of pathos and the lost dreams of youth.
—Jonah Raskin

The San Francisco Chronicle

the posthumous memoir by Kerouac's first wife, joins more than a dozen memoirs and biographies about Kerouac published since his death at 47 in 1969.

USA Today

Affectionate if unrevealing portrait of the Beat Generation icon. Edie Parker came up in the tony suburb of Grosse Pointe, Mich., comfortable but "surrounded by the ‘me' society" and ready for life in the big city. Making for New York as soon as she could leave her parents' home, she met Jack Kerouac, then on a Columbia University football scholarship, and married him just as soon as she could post bail for him, Kerouac having been jailed as an accessory to murder in the Lucien Carr affair, about which Kerouac-Parker has little to add to the bulging literature on the subject. Indeed, sad to say, this book adds little to the store of Kerouacana, apart from a few gossipy tidbits: All of Jack's friends were crazy on dope; Allen Ginsberg "could have been a great politician" but "chose to be friends with Kerouac, [William] Burroughs, and Lucien instead of women"; for a guy who would go on to write On the Road, Kerouac "never could learn to drive"; and so on. This slight, posthumously published memoir is, for all that, heartfelt, full of the naive wonderment befitting an 18-year-old bride: "Being just married, with my love almost out of jail and the beer and the food, I was in heaven! Everyone was singing and we joined in. When our steaks came it was pure joy to cut into them and we never spoke until we were done." Affectingly, Kerouac-Parker writes that she left Kerouac in 1946 because of the drugs and booze but would not do so again could she change the course of history; for his part, she adds, "Jack persisted in calling me his ‘life's wife.' "For Kerouac scholars, who will find news here and there. General readers will do better to stick to On the Road .

Kirkus Reviews