Gerald Nicosia

Saddest damn book I ever read. Tears were rolling down my face at the end at the sad fate of Jack and Neal -- Jack turned into a hopeless alcoholic calloused over and trying to feel nothing inside, and Neal transformed from American legendary living hero into Ken Kesey's dancing bear.

And it was caused by Jack's genius. That the horrible irony. The better he wrote,the worse their fates would get.

The book is based a long interview with LuAnn Henderson (the Mary Lou of the story)and remains show more true to its origins. It's spoken in her voice. She skips around and doubles back to thoughts she's already had like real people do. And she's retelling a story On The Road readers already know very well, but from her woman's perspective.

LuAnn went through four husbands herself, became a junkie for a while but cleaned up, ran nightclubs in North Beach San Francisco, had a whole big life of her own. She maintained a friendship with them both to the end and tells the tragic story of their decline as she saw it. Her daughter writes the last part.

It's just a heartbreaking book, but essential to anyone who has been affected by Kerouac's writing.
I'm still sort of stunned this morning. But it's a good stunned. show less

Reading this after finishing a re-read of On the Road was one of the best decisions I ever made in my reading life.

Reading On the Road one can't help but thinking: What was going through that girl's head? What drew her in to that crazy, high strung crowd?...Well, this book has the answer. In the words of Lu Anne Henderson "Marylou" herself.

Lu Anne was fierce, she was larger than life, and getting to understand her was absolutely wonderful. As a young, relatively-sheltered, woman I can't help show more but to marvel at her independence and zest for life. She wanted to live and to love and that's what she did, she went for it! How many of us can say the same?

Absolutely loved reading the bits about shooting the movie and all the many wonderful people that were involved in it. I have high hopes that it will acurately portray the journey that inspired generations. show less

Gerald Nicosia has been down this road before. He's authored a few books about Kerouac, often filling them with flowery prose.

His contribution to this biography is no different.

In 1978, he visited Lu Anne Henderson in order to tape record an interview with her. Thirty years later, Nicosia has realized the importance of the interview, and HighBridge Publishers have released the results as an audio book, giving a voice (as read by Vanessa Hart) to the girl who went on the road with Jack show more Kerouac and Neal Cassady.

For his part, Nicosia does what is expected. He adores his subject and places her as the heroine of the story. By reflecting on Henderson's role in cultural history, Nicosia asserts that she was a begetter of the Beat Generation due to her unique link between the two beat icons.

Nicosia's research of Henderson's life after her famous road trip is quite thorough, but occasionally he punctuates it with some tawdry language, thus giving her personality an underlying tone of the Madonna/Whore complex and making his observations of her and Cassady's unconventional lifestyle read like a cheap sex-exposé.

What keeps you listening is the interview itself, which reveals Henderson's powers of observation. She treats us to a casual sit down, reminiscing about her first hand experiences mentioned in On the Road and John Clellon Holmes' Go.

While harking back to her days of frantic youth, her keen insight expands upon the public personas of the characters found in most beat books, making this a nice companion piece to them. She also speaks of the aftermath following the publication of Kerouac's book. Hers is a heartbreaking tale of two men whose lives (his and Cassady's) were intertwined due to their shared quest for a pure life and the dream of becoming writers.

According to Henderson, a dramatic change occurred in both men after being dubbed cultural icons of the Beat Generation. Such a burden chipped away at their emotional strength, and one could argue contributed to their own demise.

It's when I hear these very personal, and intuitive, insights that I am thankful that Lu Anne Henderson took the time to share her past, letting us in for quite a ride. show less

An utterly fascinating story ... connecting many of the threads of the by now somewhat tattered fabric of the beat generation, spread, as it then was, over the entire country ... from Denver to New York, Texas, Arizona, California ... all, in this version, held together by Neal Cassady's first wife, Lu Anne Henderson. Divorced after only a short marriage, they nonetheless maintained a close relationship over decades of time, including the years when Cassady was married to another woman. The show more problem with her story is that her view of the beat world was through the narrow interstice of her own experience ... though she was more an observer than a participant. And so we see the fabric of their lives, but little of the work that went into weaving the various threads, or of the various dyes which gave them colour. show less