Story of Kerouac just 'okay'

Edie Kerouac-Parker's story of her life with Jack Kerouac is uninformative, boring

By Stephanie Mislevy, Staff Writer

November 16, 2007 | 3 p.m.

In her memoir entitled "You'll Be Okay: My Life With Jack Kerouac," author Edie Kerouac-Parker tells her story of the ways in which Kerouac impacted her life. However, she does little in way of providing details and disappoints readers expecting a typical tell-all book.

Generally, someone with the ambition to write a memoir has, or should have, a story to tell. Aside from spending many years being head-over-heels in love with famous author, poet and major influence in the Beat Generation Jack Kerouac, Kerouac-Parker has little to say and relies largely on her writing style to make her book worth reading.

Written over the course of ten years and finally published in September of 2007, the memoir begins at the end of the story, Jack's funeral. She describes the long drive there, the rain and her interactions with old friends and Jack's family members. While it's typical for memoirs to be tearjerkers, it is quite impressive for such emotion to be brought out in the first five pages, and it's a bad idea to assume that the tissues can be saved for the end of the book. Kerouac-Parker continues by leaving the subject of the funeral and going back to the beginning of her life with Jack.

She spends the rest of the novel giving a play-by-play of her life's events. She never misses an opportunity to express how very much in love she was with Jack, although readers are left to constantly wonder why. The pages share the quirks of Jack's personality, but never really reveal any sort of reason for them. It is questionable as to how well the author herself really knew her lover. She often says things like, "This was something he did often," or "Jack was just that kind of person." For a tome that consists of nearly 300 pages, very little insight is provided. Her lack of enthusiasm to express anything other than her love for him is insulting to those who consider Kerouac a brilliant talent.

As the story progresses, the novel turns from the meticulous recap of Edie and Jack's nights on the town and parties with close friends and tells the scandalous story of a murder committed by Jack's good friend Lucien, landing them both in jail. Edie dips into her inheritance fund and marries Jack in an incredibly brief ceremony so that she can bail him out.

To an unknowing reader, such a story seems to be a secret so big that it makes the novel worth reading—the inside story that most memoirs or tell-all books promise. However, the same story can be found on most of Kerouac's fan sites and even Wikipedia and is undoubtedly well known by any avid Kerouac fan.

Jack and Edie eventually divorce and drift apart, losing touch with one another as years go by. At the time of Jack's death, they have stopped communicating entirely, and she learns of his death on the news. As the story nears the end, it becomes apparent that the author has less and less to say. Entire years go by on one page. This is a big change from the beginning of the work, when a single moment took two or three pages to fully express. Such a change seems a poor choice on the author's part, as it leaves the reader bored, anxious and in a hurry to get to the end.

The major aspect that makes this book worth reading is not the story itself, but its beautiful writing. Kerouac-Parker, spending much of her life reading and discussing novels and poetry with Jack, is a very talented writer. If the term "sing-song voice" could be applied to something written, "You'll Be Okay" would be a prime example.

Characters in a fiction novel are not real. They become whoever the author wants them to be. They suffer no consequences, and they feel no pain. Kerouac-Parker's knack for story telling makes it very easy to become lost in the story and engulfed in emotions and forget altogether that the names in the book are not just characters. These names belong to real people. Somewhere there are people who are all to familiar with the events and emotions that fill the pages, and such a realization bring the volume's tear jerking status to a whole new level.

"You'll Be Okay" is a somewhat dry recounting of the life of Edie Kerouac-Parker and the love of her life, a mysterious man who, following the publishing of this memoir, still remains mysterious. Held together only by the author's ability to string words into a masterpiece of emotion, it should be read strictly as a storybook rather than the eloquent, insightful memoir that it was intended to be.

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"You'll Be Okay" is sold online and can be found at Alden Library.