Photo courtesy of Brenda Knight
Copyright Fred W. McDarrah 1996
“Joyce was a city girl, bookish, the closely watched
only child of more ambitious Upper West Side parents…But she was writing–a
novel, already under contract –and that was her good fortune, I thought. We
shared what was most important to us: common assumptions about our uncommon
lives. We lived outside, as if.
As if we were men? As if we were new,
freer versions of ourselves? There have always been women like us."
-Hettie
Jones
Joyce Johnson was a freer women because she refused to abide by the social
codes of the fifties that kept encouraging young women to be mothers and
wives. She rebelled against her strict parents and societies rules and went
on to participate in the Beat movement. Joyce Johnson received a National
Books Circle Critics Award for her memoir, Minor Characters, and she
is remembered not only from her relationship with Jack Kerouac, but as an
important and essential woman in the Beat community.
Joyce Glassman was an only child born into a strict,
Jewish home. Ironically, she grew up on West 116th street, a
block away from the apartment Joan Vollmer Adams shared with
Edie Parker.
Being that she was an only child, her parents, especially her mother placed
all their aspirations in her development as a proper lady. Joyce’s mother
dreamed of Joyce’s success as a great pianist and she never really
encouraged her to do anything else, except marry a good man. Joyce states
in Minor Characters, “But my mother can’t help herself. Her love for
me is the all-consuming passion of her life. She recognizes no boundaries
between our separate beings. She only wants to protect me from everything
the way she protected me from drowning when I was little by not teaching me
to swim, or from irrevocably scarring myself by discouraging me from
climbing or running or riding a two-wheeler in the park” (Minor Characters
16).
Written
by:
Elisabeth Massie
Last updated: 22 July 2005