Jan Kerouac in Eugene, Oregon, 1983. Photograph by D. Alexander Stuart, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Halfway through her 1981 autobiographical novel, Baby Driver, the story of her hectic, careening life as a young bohemian woman traveling through North and South America in the sixties and seventies, Jan Kerouac calls herself “a gum wrapper in a whirlwind.” In this moment, Kerouac has just decided to move from Santa Fe, where she’s been sleeping with local politicians for money, to work as an escort at a poolside men’s club in Phoenix. It’s one impulsive decision in a long string of them, and although the remark seems tossed off and casual, it perfectly captures the whole chaotic course of her wayward existence.

Not surprisingly, the gig goes awry. The police raid the club for prostitution, and the owners are forced to reconstitute as a “massage parlor” in a trailer outside of town. Kerouac soon grows weary of the work, for which she consumes an obliterating combination of wine, soda, and “bennies” to produce “a loose capable vigor just made to order for the job,” as she winkingly puts it. She makes a snap decision to get back on the highway, leaving as hastily as she arrived: “Bounding along, flashing past saguaros in my silver Caddy, serenaded by Willie Nelson wailing in the desert air … never felt so free,” she writes. “I had $800 and I was going back to Santa Fe. … I was like Marco Polo bringing wondrous bounty to amaze the folks back home.”

With her invocation of Marco Polo, the thirteenth-century Venetian explorer who wrote the best-selling Travels of Marco Polo, Kerouac asserts her place in a men’s club of a different sort. Baby Driver is a startlingly original example of the modern road-trip chronicle—a genre traditionally associated with men, and with one man in particular: her father, Jack Kerouac, the writer-adventurer renowned for On the Road (1957), his own autobiographical novel about traveling across America.

Baby Driver is not an exploration of their relationship, as one might expect. Although Kerouac was known the world over, he was barely known to his daughter. Jan Kerouac met her father in person only twice; he died in 1969, when she was just seventeen. The book is instead a jagged excursion into an underworld the elder Kerouac only skirted. Jan lived, not entirely by choice, the kind of hardscrabble life her father contrived for literary reasons. Still, one sees in her novel certain aspects of his best-known works, chiefly their restless journeying, experimental prose, rejection of traditional or materialist values, and a commitment to freedom and spontaneity as vital principles of life and art. Baby Driver is at its core a picaresque novel, and possibly the truest example we have of what I would call the female picaresque.

In a picaresque novel, the hero rambles around having adventures—or, perhaps more accurately, misadventures—often of a sexual or romantic sort. He or she (but usually he) tends to be fatherless, of modest origins, a rascal, an outsider living by his wits. While there’s a robust pantheon of roguish wanderers in Western literature—Don Quixote; Tom Jones; Huckleberry Finn; Augie March; Hunter S. Thompson’s alter ego, Raoul Duke; and Jack Kerouac’s Sal Paradise, as well as that character’s sidekick, Dean Moriarty (based on Neal Cassady), all spring to mind—there isn’t an equivalent deep bench when it comes to female picaresque heroines. The historical reasons for this are obvious. Until at least the sixties, women weren’t free to travel around alone, and they faced social condemnation if they did. A novel about a fictional female drifter pitching from escapade to escapade would have been neither likely nor believable. As Joyce Johnson drily puts it in Minor Characters: A Young Woman’s Coming-of-Age in the Beat Orbit of Jack Kerouac, “Young women found the pursuit of freedom much more complicated.”

In an essay I wrote on the topic nearly a decade ago, I named a few of my favorite female picaresques, like Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus, noting that memoirs like Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love and Cheryl Strayed’s Wild were contemporary successors to these books. But I neglected to mention Baby Driver, arguably the most honest, gutsy, and quietly heroic novel belonging to the genre, because I had never heard of it. I didn’t even know Jack Kerouac had a daughter.

Though her work has received some interest over the years from scholars and Kerouac enthusiasts alike, Jan Kerouac’s life and writing have for the most part been relegated to a footnote in her father’s biography. Her mother, Joan Haverty, was Jack Kerouac’s second wife; they lived together for a mere eight months, notably during the frenzied three-week period in April 1951 when he typed, on a hundred-and-twenty-foot-long scroll of taped-together tracing paper, the first-draft manuscript of On the Road. Joan, who appears as “Laura” in the novel, worked as a waitress to support him. Upon learning she was pregnant, Kerouac asked her to get an abortion—illegal at the time—but she refused. On February 16, 1952, Jan was born.

Kerouac never publicly acknowledged his only child. It is said that this was to protect his devoutly Catholic mother, Gabrielle—always the central female figure in his life—who wouldn’t have tolerated the idea of him leaving a pregnant Joan. But a court-ordered paternity test he took in 1961, when Jan was nine and a half years old, proved she was his, as if their uncanny physical resemblance wasn’t evidence enough. After one child-support hearing, Kerouac wrote to Allen Ginsberg, saying Joan “showed me pixes of the dotter who I think looks like me … so may be mine.”

Gerald Nicosia, one of Kerouac’s biographers and the editor of Jan Kerouac: A Life in Memory (2009), contends that “both her life and work, indeed her very existence,” are “being systematically erased from literary history.” Whether this alleged erasure is due to the shrouded circumstances of her paternity, or arose as a penalty for having tangled with her late father’s estate, it’s impossible to say. What is clear is that Jan Kerouac’s obscurity is undeserved. Although Baby Driver (1981) has long been out of print, as has her second autobiographical novel, Train Song (1988)—her third, Parrot Fever, was unfinished when she died of kidney failure in 1996, at only forty-four years old—the book begs for rediscovery. Readers may look for, and find, in Baby Driver echoes of familiar Beat themes, but the book’s dark music is all her own.

Baby Driver hews closely to the facts of Jan Kerouac’s turbulent life, so one can only guess what liberties she took that make it fiction. Today, we would call it autofiction. (The title comes from the 1969 Paul Simon song of the same name—whose lyrics provide the book’s epigraph—and the book bears no relation to the 2017 movie.) The novel opens in Yelapa, Mexico, where Kerouac, fifteen, pregnant, and on probation from a reformatory, has run away from New York City to avoid being sent to a home for unwed mothers. “I patted the turquoise cloth draped over my seven-month belly,” she writes, “feeling the baby move within, revolving now like a restless planet.” Her writing is intensely visual; she has a poet’s gift for distilling language into odd, arresting imagery. “This hard compact ball was comforting—a rubber bumper to protect me from the world.” The baby is stillborn, and although the stoic Kerouac wastes little time on self-analysis, the trauma shadows her aimless, incessant wandering that follows.

To call her a rolling stone would be an understatement. She makes her way up the West Coast to Kittitas, Washington, with her then husband, John. They live next door to her mother, Joan, and Kerouac works at a health food store “amid shining ranks of juice bottles and bins of powdered yeast.” After three years of “cuddly lukewarm” marriage, she lights out alone for Santa Fe, where she has a series of misbegotten romantic affairs, descends into alcohol and heroin addiction, and dabbles in prostitution. She travels through Central and South America, eventually ending up in the Peruvian jungle with a psychotic lover from whom she has to plot a cunning escape. The chapters chronicling her rootless adult years alternate with those that tunnel back into her feral childhood on New York City’s Lower East Side. There, she lives in various crumbling tenements with her flaky yet determined mother and three younger half-siblings. When she is only twelve years old, a man in his early twenties introduces her to LSD. In no time, she loses interest in school, stops attending, grows increasingly defiant, and is committed to Bellevue by her mother. She spends the rest of her early teen years in and out of juvenile detention homes.

The novel is a series of vignettes, some clipped and strobe-like, others more drawn out. Baby Driver’s supporting characters—its paramours, roommates, female friends, drug buddies—make rapid entrances and exits, rarely hanging around for more than a few pages. Places change just as quickly as Kerouac moves from one shoddy dwelling to the next. An adobe house in Santa Fe looks “like a lopsided ceramic kindergarten project.” In another “moldy crackerbox house,” she cocoons herself in a pair of fluffy pink comforters and rides out her “heavy junk fog” under a red light’s reassuring glow. For a while, she lives in her car, “sleeping in a bundle of wreckage in the back seat.” She calls it “the shabbiest house I’d ever lived in.” To avoid staying there, she tells us, she floats among one-night stands. Baby Driver has a desperate, improvisational momentum. Kerouac just doesn’t give up.

She survives by working the oddest of odd jobs: encyclopedia salesperson, movie extra, go-go dancer, racetrack stable hand. These flash by because the jobs themselves are transient, much like her relationships. One critic griped that her “autobiography is one of constant directionless movement, compressing more elements into this one book than her father lived in ten!” But such was the reality of her poor, itinerant existence. The force of Jan’s personality and her pragmatic survivor’s energy keep the novel from falling into fragments. And of course, the very essence of the picaresque is its pell-mell tumbling quality. As William S. Burroughs said in a 1974 interview, with all the swaggering self-assurance of a famous male writer: “I myself am in a very old tradition, namely, that of the picaresque novel. People complain that my novels have no plot. Well, a picaresque novel has no plot. It is simply a series of incidents.”

Baby Driver teems with incidents, but Kerouac also attends to small, sensory details. She writes of “flying metallically on the swings” as a child, sums up a love affair as “a whirl of adolescent flavors,” and describes go-go dancing at a billiards bar “amid heavy beerscent.” She’s a master of the close-up—there’s not an uninteresting description in the book—and her knack for defamiliarization animates the chapters about her childhood especially. She describes her Lower East Side grade school as having “enormous cruel hallways that seemed designed to terrify,” with “sickening green paint and gruesome wire caging between stairways” that “always made the whole place look like a transparent insect’s digestive tract, the kids going up and down its food.” Her writing often has the off-kilter, uncanny clarity of outsider art, untainted by consensus perceptions, and her visceral language is strikingly effective at conveying the squalor of tenement-slum life. The ancient radiators, “crouched ornately, hissing and popping and leaking by the cold soot-silled windows.” The noise of the manhole cover jostled by cars that forms the “heartbeat of the street.” Her tough, beleaguered mother “stepping from milk crate to milk crate over a foot-deep sea of sewage on the kitchen floor, frying Italian sausages for dinner.”

Drugs offered a way to escape or enchant her dispiriting circumstances. Of an LSD trip, she writes, “I heard water dripping in paradisical tones somewhere—most likely from the leaky kitchen faucet—but it sounded to me like primeval droplets in the Garden of Eden.” Her prose has a psychedelic, synesthetic quality. The passages about getting high, an abundance of them, rank with the hallucinatory drug writing of Robert Stone, Denis Johnson, and Kate Braverman. Here, she shoots heroin at her drug-connection boyfriend’s house in Albuquerque: “I took off the red sash from the long evening dress I still had on, pulled it around my arm, and rested my arm on my crossed leg knee,” she writes. “I bent over—teeth clenched ravenously on the sash—nice plump aqua veins standing up—then pp! The point pierced ever so delicately until that gorgeous little blossom of crimson appeared in the neck of the dropper.”

But does she write like her father? The question is inevitable, if patronizing. Jan herself addressed it directly and pronounced it beside the point. “People may read my stuff and think, This is Jack Kerouac’s daughter, let’s see if she’s as good as he is,” she says in Brenda Knight’s Women of the Beat Generation. “But it’s not necessary to make a comparison like that, because I wasn’t trying to emulate his type of writing.” Some moments in Baby Driver do clearly mark her not only as his genetic offspring but as his literary and spiritual heir. Palm trees in Phoenix are “green spikes protruding from the back of this vast lizardcity,” and she hears a freight train’s “plaintive far-spiraling whistle screaming through the night.” Yet her style, much earthier, is her own. Where the father tended to paint the world with a spiritual or mystical sheen (“He was very emotional,” Jan once said, “and everything he saw was directly related to his soul”), the daughter writes with shrewd, almost clinical detachment, her language elemental and concrete. She often physicalizes her emotions, as when she describes her stint at the men’s club: “All this with the amber shield of booze partitioning off the feeling, each motion conveniently down the drain as soon as it’s done—hardly any sensation remembered.” Kerouac launched countless imitators, but his daughter wasn’t among them.

One of Baby Driver’s most bruising and memorable scenes occurs near the end of the novel, when Kerouac visits her father and sums him up with canny, unflinching clarity. Fifteen years old, pregnant with a drug dealer’s baby, and en route to Mexico, she tracks Jack down at his home in Lowell, Massachusetts, to find him sitting in a rocking chair “about one foot from the TV, upending a fifth of whiskey,” watching The Beverly Hillbillies. He is living with his third and last wife, Stella Sampas, and his aging mother, Gabrielle, who is confined to a wheelchair. “Now that his mother could no longer take care of him, Jack had married another mother to take care of them both,” Jan writes. At one point, Jack starts hollering for someone to turn down the TV, complaining that he can’t hear himself think. “This seemed odd, for he was closer to the TV than anyone else in the room,” Jan observes. “But someone did turn it down for him, and he continued to guzzle his giant baby bottle, rocking himself as if in a cradle.” This is as pitiless a portrait of the declining Beat legend as we possess, almost thrillingly unsentimental. When Jack learns she’s headed to Mexico (a country he had visited multiple times and romanticized in his novels and poetry), his parting words are, “Yeah, you go to Mexico an’ write a book. You can use my name.”

But Kerouac, obviously, was her name, too. Although Jan was not yet a writer, fashioning a literary identity apart from her father’s would become a tricky problem for her. In a letter dated November 18, 1977, Ginsberg, her godfather and a mentor to her, responded to a query she had sent him about whether to change the working title of her manuscript from Everthreads to Off the Road. (Baby Driver was the suggestion of the publisher.) He urged her to declare her independence as a literary talent: “no need to mirror ‘The Road’—your name already mirrors your father sufficient, & your prose is your own extension of your named self, no need to fall back on gimmick.” It seems she took his advice. Baby Driver treats the subject of her father with artful restraint. He appears in person in the book only twice, as he did in her life (she dramatizes both encounters), while other references to him are oblique. In the opening chapter, a letter arrives in Mexico containing her monthly support check from him for fifty-two dollars, “autographed by the famous wino himself.” And after Ginsberg gives her Jack’s number, she phones him, reaching him, drunk as ever, “in his invisible hideout somewhere out in black-telephone-land.” For all its surface vagabonding, Baby Driver is at root an aching tale of unrequited love, a story of yearning for an elusive paternal relationship. The bond between father and daughter that never formed is replaced by a symbolic, artistic bond, the spiritual entanglement of two writers.

Ironically, Jan Kerouac’s darker and more extreme brand of mischief—the psychedelics, the sex work, the heroin—make her father’s On the Road high jinks seem tame and even a tad dilettantish by comparison. Jan writes with the eerie sangfroid of someone who came of age in a harsher, less innocent era. Where her father tended toward breathless lyricism, she is bracingly direct and unvarnished, sometimes brutally so, allowing the bare facts to speak for themselves. She doesn’t apologize, protest, moralize, or pose. Nor does she exaggerate for effect. The bourgeois conventions her father was escaping simply don’t exist for her. “We felt no grief or anxiety for a life of comfort we’d lost, since we’d never had one,” she writes. By the time she was born, the previous generation’s Beat idealism had come and gone. The hangover was bleak. The celebrated fathers were drunk, dead, or crazy; the wives and girlfriends cast aside and embittered. The neglected children were left to sift through the rubble.

“So the children of the Beat writers and artists had dysfunctional parents. So what?” one defender of the movement wrote in a letter to the New York Times. He was responding to “Children of the Beats,” a 1995 article by Daniel Pinchbeck, the son of Joyce Johnson, which described the personal destruction wreaked by the revolutionary hipsters. “At least the Beats produced a body of work that inspired and gave hope to some of us. I’m sorry Jan Kerouac’s father didn’t do much for her—he sure did a hell of a lot for me.”

To be abandoned by a father whom so many admired as a cultural father figure is a poignant predicament. When Jan was hospitalized with hepatitis at thirteen years old, a doctor noticed the spelling of her last name, and asked if she was related to the writer; she said she was. “He thought it was of utmost importance that I read On the Road,” she recalls, “and next day he brought it to me.” After staying up all night reading the novel, she has a realization about her father, both melancholy and freeing: “Now that I had a picture of what he’d been doing all this time, all over the country, it made more sense that he hadn’t had time to be fatherly.”

The remarkable triumph of Baby Driver is its stubborn resistance to self-pity. No matter how sad her plight, and it was tragic in many ways, Jan Kerouac refuses to play the victim, even when it seems plainly justified. She writes without bitterness or blame, either refusing resentment or immune to it. She owns her experiences, decisions, and flaws, without reservation. Fate sent Jan Kerouac down a difficult road, but she traveled it as if she’d chosen it.

From Amanda Fortini’s introduction to Baby Driver by Jan Kerouac, to be published by New York Review Books in November.

Amanda Fortini is a columnist for County Highway, a frequent contributor to T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and has also written for The New Yorker, The Believer, California Sunday, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Paris Review, among other publications. A 2020 recipient of the Rabkin Prize for arts journalism, she divides her time between Livingston, Montana, and Las Vegas, Nevada. She is at work on a book of essays about Las Vegas titled “Flamingo Road.”