Poverty and squalor, free-spirited artists, fags and outcasts. What kept me reading was the other side of the story, those glimpses of bohemian life, of life as lived by someone with no real interest in making even a somewhat comfortable living. Fun to read, though I didn't find it erotic enough to actually get my blood moving. It starts out on the smutty side-the first three chapters are basically quick set-ups for sex scenes-and the sex is written about in classic porno style (lots of lines like 'I took his huge, throbbing cock into my hungry, wet pussy.'). Even the term beatnik was the Hollywood term for the Beats and so you could see that it really isn't something that she could term 'serious' writing as she mentions in her afterword.Ī schizophrenic book, with two distinct personalities: hardcore smut and bohemian memoir. But the focus on sex was only to satisfy the publisher since a lot of it was made up. So yes I can understand why you would be disappointed. Now I went into this book knowing what to expect because my teacher warned us before reading it for my Beat class. And I think the Author's note and the Afterword says a lot to why she wrote this book the way she did. But most of the sex was written just to satisfy her publishers so she could get paid. She was someone outside of Kerouac and Ginsberg's circle, so she wasn't even aware the was a thing called Beat until she read Howl. This was a woman who was beat outside of the beats for a long time. But there is stuff hidden beneath the surface that you really don't notice until the last chapter. I laugh at all the negative reviews of the book because all they saw was a pornographic novel, which is true, because that is what is was written as.

Memoirs of beatnik