Joyce Johnson is an American author of fiction and nonfiction, whose writing has been closely associated with the Beat Generation. She was also a child actress and appeared in the Broadway production of I Remember Mama, which she went on to write about in her 2004 memoir Missing Men.
Personal life
She was born Joyce Glassman in 1935 to a Jewish family in New York and raised in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, a few blocks from the apartment of Joan Vollmer Adams where William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac lived from 1944 to 1946.
Johnson was brought up in an unconventional manner for the time. One example is her mother who at 19 was continually moving from one place to another in her family's efforts to help her gain better marital prospects. As she said in the County College of Morris's Legacy Project Forum on Women of the Beat Generation being exposed to many various situations growing up, she believes that that is why she learned not to be dependent on anyone. Like her mother, she went to an all-girls high school and women's college.
Johnson recalled living a double life until she was eighteen, during that time she was in a relationship with a Barnard instructor named Donald Cook who was ten years her senior and was also Lucien Carr’s and Allen Ginsberg's Columbia classmate. From her relationship with Cook, she was introduced to Carl Solomon, Burroughs and Ginsberg. Ginsberg and Johnson met at Cook's apartment when she was 16, and from here began her friendship with Ginsberg. The book was published before the Beatnik movement became a widespread cultural phenomenon and has been recognised as the first Beat novel written by a woman. Other than Come and Join the Dance, she has also published other novels like Bad Connections in 1978 and In the Night Cafe in 1987. These novels have a similar theme where they highlighted the life of women in 1950 and 60s.
In the first month of 1957, Johnson met Jack Kerouac on a blind date arranged by Allen Ginsberg. Kerouac encouraged Johnson to write her first book in 1962. However, their love affair lasted only two years and led her in writing a memoir entitled Minor Characters which was published in 1983. The memoir reflects on her life between 1957 and 1958, especially about her relationship with Kerouac. It also highlighted Kerouac who rose from obscurity to fame following the publication of his novel On the Road in 1957. Further, it also reflected on herself turning back from middle-class life where her parents want her to be a composer. However, she wanted to become a poet and musician; thus, she began to escape and sneak out to Washington Square Park to chase her dream. This memoir has brought attention to the contents, personal life, career experiences of women associated with the Beat Generation writers. She was an editor at William Morrow, The Dial Press, McGraw-Hill and The Atlantic Monthly Press. After leaving publishing, she wrote for periodicals including Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, New York, Harper's Bazaar, Mirabella, and Harper's. From 1983 to 1997, she taught writing at Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, The University of Vermont, New York University and primarily at Columbia University’s MFA program.
From the period, her best-known work is her memoir entitled Minor Characters won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983. Then in 1987, her penultimate chapter from her novel In the Night Cafe, which is ″The Children's Wing″ won the first prize in the O. Henry Award. Also, she received an award or grant from The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in 1992.
Style of Writing
Non-fiction
In general, the memoirs by Joyce Johnson comprise insights regarding her personal experience, memories, and identity. She had written four memoirs which are Minor Characters, Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, Missing Men: A Memoir and The Voice is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac that were published in 1983, 2000, 2004 and 2012 respectively. It can be seen that her life experiences as a female writer and the relationship with Jack Kerouac have been written in these memoirs.
With regards to the style of writing, Joyce Johnson had her own way to express her thoughts in writing. It can be seen that she is meticulous in her work because she wants to give the best reading experience to the readers. Joyce Johnson's main concern in the process of writing is the structure rather than the theme in her literary works. This means that she needs a proper plan to organise the ideas in her works. Thus, her style of writing varies from the other Beat writers who are commonly associated with the notion of spontaneous writing.
Besides that, Joyce Johnson used descriptive and narrative styles to write about her life stories which include characters, settings and conflicts. These writing styles can be regarded as the most effective way for her to describe the events in details based on her personal experience. She had to be selective in choosing particular events to be included in her literary work. This can be seen in the interview with Nancy Grace:<blockquote>For example, I could have put in everything that happened to me during the years that I was writing about, but there was a lot of stuff I simply left out because I wanted to have a focus. For example, the fact that when I was a child I was in the theater. Well, that was very interesting, but it would have taken me away from what I was really writing about, so I didn't put that material in In an interview with Nancy Grace in May 1999, Johnson admitted that Andre Gide's The Counterfeiters has been a great influence for her to write that kind of story. She deemed to be constantly worried about writing it at the beginning. <blockquote>Oh, I wrote that novel with so much uncertainty I could hardly believe I was actually writing one. I was so scared. And also, I was quite nervous. I was quite aware that I was writing about things that a nice, young lady should not write about. If you wrote about those things people would think you had experienced them yourself — that my parents would read it and be shocked. And various people did read it and were shocked. Reviewers were shocked! Johnson perceives herself merely as the observer of the movement she engaged in as a way to empower herself where she can make commentaries about it but at the same time not becoming too attached to it. She mentioned in one of her memoirs: <blockquote>The role of an observer has its advantages. You may play as much a part in the group as you wish, but when you are drawn in a little too tightly, you can always say 'Well after all, I'm just an observer,' and step back into safety again Being one of the few women that managed to find her way to the top of the Beat Movement, Johnson uses this opportunity as a medium in sharing her experiences living as a woman who drifted away from reaching the path of conventionality in her literary works.<blockquote>I would make it my business to write about young women quite different from the ones portrayed on the pages of the New Yorker. I would write about furnished rooms and sex.<blockquote>That is, the novel instantiates rules, customs, and convictions of the Beat generation for women, but critiques them by reversing the status of the sexes, even while preserving the binary, hierarchic structure of the gender system.</blockquote>By taking that into consideration, her portrayal of women in her writings opens a new way of looking at how a woman, infused with the ideas of this movement, represents a female protagonist in large part on the margin of the rapidly developing American society.<blockquote>Hello. I'm Jack. Allen tells me you're very nice. Would you like to come down to Howard Johnson's on Eighth Street? I'll be sitting at the counter.</blockquote>Joyce Johnson who was 21 years old met Jack Kerouac, 13 years old older than her. Thus, began a relationship that lasted nearly two years. Their relationship started due to their shared passion for writing and did not last long as Johnson claimed that Kerouac was a mess when it came to relationships with women. During those days, Johnson was still struggling with her first novel which is Come and Join the Dance. Johnson's role as a former girlfriend of a popular author has overshadowed her own works although she was an accomplished writer herself.<blockquote>In a way it has been a curse. Because people cannot see me as a writer apart from my relationship to that material. It has been immensely frustrating.
Johnson's reputation as a writer is often overshadowed by the mystique surrounding Kerouac. The Kerouac biographer Ellis Amburn falsely alleges that Johnson and Helen Weaver, another author and ex-girlfriend of Kerouac, got into a physical fight in his book Subterranean Kerouac.