Confessions from the Margin: A Beat Woman’s Journey, 1954-1964

This is a memoir of a woman who lived on the margin of her time and place. The time is the 1950's and '60's; the place, the provinces and cities of America--and around Europe. The woman studies and teaches in colleges and wanders single and alone throughout her twenties through the midwest and Europe. Her story raises questions that her time and place don't answer easily. How to live? Career or husband or are both possible? Children, the ticking biological clock? How to deal with love and sex? How to resist the prevailing pressure of the times to conform: marry, get the tract house in the suburbs, have children? Resist because the woman has roots in the early Beat scene in New York City with her writer/brother, John Clellon Holmes, and his friend, Jack Kerouac. She starts her single life on that margin. As she sets out on that journey she carries Beat values with her--anti-Moloch materialism, freedom, wandering, sexual experimentation, the search for revelation and spirit--and all to a jazz beat. And then, the woman problem--her meager choices, the amazing sexual strictures women had to work around to express their sensuality, all under the text quote from the New York Times of January, 2009--What do women want? One woman's journey is through this minefield of questions and it's dramatized with a diverse array of men and women who push her this way and that as she heads toward hor own unique resolution. Though it's historical, the memoir is a modern woman's story where values, after many twists and turns of her times, finally lead her to an off-beat conclusion.

I grew up in New York City, graduated from NYU and later taught college in the Midwest. I began to write later, when I wrote a memoir of my NY years entitled ＂681 Lexington Avenue--A Beat Education in New York City, 1947-1954＂, which was published in 2008 by Greater Midwest Publishing Company. It contained portraits of my brother, John Clellon Holmes, author of ＂Go,＂ Jack Kerouac and other Beat figures. I also wrote five novels, one of which, ＂An Awful Intimacy＂ won the Ulysses Award from the Independent literature Institute in 2003. I married and taught college English in Chicago for years. My husband and i now live in Maine.