The Awakener : A Memoir of Jack Kerouac and the Fifties

The Awakener is Helen Weaver's long awaited memoir of her adventures with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lenny Bruce, and other wild characters from the New York City of the fifties and sixties. The sheltered but rebellious daughter of bookish Midwestern parents, Weaver survived a repressive upbringing in the wealthy suburbs of Scarsdale and an early divorce to land in Greenwich Village just in time for the birth of rock 'n' roll--and the counterculture movement known as the Beat Generation. Shortly after her arrival Kerouac, Ginsberg, and company--old friends of her roommate--arrive on their doorstep after a non-stop drive from Mexico. Weaver and Kerouac fall in love on sight, and Kerouac moves in. "...[Weaver] paints a romantic picture of Greenwich Village in the 1950s and '60s, when she worked in publishing and hung out with Allen Ginsberg and the poet Richard Howard and was wild and loose, getting high and falling into bed almost immediately with her crushes, including Lenny Bruce...Her descriptions of the Village are evocative, recalling a time when she wore 'long skirts, Capezio ballet shoes and black stockings,' and used to 'sit in the Bagatelle and have sweet vermouth on the rocks with a twist of lemon. ' Early on, she quotes Pasternak: 'You in others: this is your soul.' Kerouac's soul lives on through many people--Joyce Johnson, for one--but few have been as adept as Weaver at capturing both him and the New York bohemia of the time. He was lucky to have met her."--Tara McKelvey, The New York Times Book Review "There is a tendency for memoirs written by women about The Great Man to be self-abnegating exercises in a kind of inverted narcissism--the author seeking to prove her worth as muse, as consort, as chosen one. Not so with Helen Weaver's beautiful, plainspoken elegy for her time spent with Jack Kerouac, who suddenly appeared at her door in the West Village one white, frosty morning with Allen Ginsberg, who knew Weaver's roommate, in tow."--New York Post