Joyce Johnson’s memoir of New York in the late 1950s begins at the edge of the Beat Generation.

Johnson was twenty-one when she met Jack Kerouac, shortly before the publication of On the Road, and their relationship placed her inside the circle of Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Gregory Corso at the precise moment the Beats were becoming public mythology. But Johnson writes what the mythology obscured. All the lines of fire, the girlfriends, lovers, typists, artists and writers whose own ambitions were frequently subordinated to the supposedly more important work of the men around them.

Johnson writes about Kerouac without flattening him into either genius or monster, and about herself without pretending hindsight made her less implicated in the world she describes. It's a really great book about being young near history while recognising that proximity to somebody else’s legend is not the same thing as having a life of your own. Generous in its reflection. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award and has since become one of the essential accounts of the Beat milieu from a woman who was actually there. 

Virago, London, 1995. Paperback. Light shelf wear and rubbing to covers, with mild edge wear. Pages lightly age-toned; internally clean and binding firm. Very good condition.