Recollections of My Nonexistence

by Rebecca Solnit

I did like some things about Kerouac’s prose style, just not the gender politics of the three men who were most often meant when people talked about the Beats. Those politics had contaminated Kerouac’s On the Road for me when I was a teenager. I got as far as the protagonist’s encounter with Terry—“the cutest little Mexican girl” who he later calls “a dumb little Mexican wench” with “a simple and funny little mind.” And then the protagonist—a lightly fictionalized Kerouac—takes off and leaves her. As in the film, a woman is a stationary object, a man is a pilgrim and a heroic wanderer. He’s Odysseus; she’s Penelope, but Homer took an interest in the gallant struggle of the woman who stayed home. It seemed to me that I would never be the footloose protagonist, that I was closer to the young Latina on the California farm who gets left behind, and halfway through I put the novel down. The book was going to go on without people like me, and I was going to go on without it.