Showing how grammar was taught in the 1950s conveys an immediate feeling for the restricting corsets of convention of the time. Those threads describing the texture of the 1950’s are gently interwoven with the great love story as seen from Joyces perspective the short, tragic affair between Joyces best college friend, Elise, and Allen Ginsburg is told in parallel. Johnson, of course, shows what Kerouac was like, but she also skillfully captures the feel of Greenwich Village and Barnard College. The book is through-composed and the story draws the reader forward towards her meeting Kerouac, falling in love with him and separating from him. She makes it abundantly clear that while women may have been considered muses, more often they were seen as inexorable pulls towards fatal domesticity (fatal to art, that is). One "minor character" is accorded just half a sentence in biographies of cult author Jack Kerouac: he had "an erratic love affair with Joyce Glassmann between 19." In 1983, Glassmann (now Johnson) published her account of that time, and of what came before (sheltered Jewish family life on New Yorks Upper West Side) and after (love and loss, motherhood and friendship, reading and writing).
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