Runaway: Notes on the Myths that Made Me

by Erin Keane

Overview

Examining her mother’s youth as a runaway, the editor-in-chief of Salon analyzes how pop culture treats men’s stories versus women’s stories.

In 1970, Erin Keane’s mother ran away from home for the first time. She was thirteen years old. Over the next several years, and under two assumed identities, she hitchhiked her way across America, experiencing freedom, hardship, and tragedy. At fifteen, she met a man in New York City and married him. He was thirty-six.

Through a deft balance of journalistic digging, cultural criticism, and poetic reimagining, Keane pieces together the true story of her mother’s teenage years, questioning almost everything she’s been told about her parents and their relationship. Along the way, she also considers how pop culture has kept similar narratives alive in her. At stake are some of the most profound questions we can ask ourselves: What’s true? What gets remembered? Who gets to tell the stories that make us who we are?

Whether it’s talking about painful family history, #MeToo, Star Wars, true crime forensics, or Gilmore Girls, Runaway is an unforgettable look at all the different ways the stories we tell—both personal and pop cultural—create us.

Praise for Runaway

Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR
“Keane provides a lyrical, sharp feminist analysis of her family’s history.” —Kirkus Reviews

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781953368324
Publisher:	Arcadia Publishing SC
Publication date:	05/01/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	195
Sales rank:	950,126
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Erin Keane is a critic, poet, essayist, and journalist. She’s the author of three collections of poetry, and editor of The Louisville Anthology (Belt Publishing). Her writing has appeared in many publications and anthologies, and in 2

Table of Contents

1.     She’s a Bright Girl

2.     Earl-Aye in the Morning

3.     Jersey Girls

4.     The Rules of Hitchhiking

5.     Taking Off

6.     The Queen of Alphabet City

7.     Fairytales of New York

8.     If Your Mother Says She Loves You, Check It Out

9.     Greetings from Tatooine, Arizona

10.  The Tower

Notes

Acknowledgments

 

Editorial Reviews

08/08/2022

Salon editor-in-chief Keane (Death-Defying Acts) combines memoir and cultural criticism in this gut-wrenching account of the shadows Hollywood and her parents’ star-crossed relationship have cast over her life. In 1972, Keane’s mother was a 15-year-old runaway living in New York City’s East Village when she met and married a 36-year-old man recovering from a heroin addiction. Though Keane’s father died when she was five, transforming him into “a romantic figure in absentia,” her mother rebuilt her life as a labor and delivery nurse and remarried. It’s her gritty memories—of stealing clothes from the hippie boutique where she briefly worked, of being drugged and gang raped at a Long Island motel—that give the book much of its emotional punch and set the stage for Keane’s inquiries into American popular culture. She takes to task such celebrated films as Woody Allen’s Manhattan and John Ford’s The Searchers for prioritizing male over female perspectives and grooming viewers to accept sexual exploitation and violence against women. At times, the parallels between the personal and cultural feel tenuous, as when Keane views the dissolution of her parents’ marriage and her move to Arizona with her mom and her brother through the lens of Star Wars, but her lyrical prose, candid self-reflections, and diligent research will resonate with readers. This eagle-eyed inquiry hits the mark. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Erin Keane’s Runaway is a moving and extremely important piece of contemporary memoir that deserves to be read by all.  Keane is a brilliant storyteller, who bravely walks us through her beautifully complicated family dynamic, with prose that is razor sharp, informative and powerful enough to make us reexamine ourselves and everything we subscribe to. I highly recommend.” –– D Watkins, New York Times Bestselling author of Where Tomorrow’s Aren’t Promised and The Cook Up 

“In Runaway, Erin Keane sands down the shimmering outlines of teenage identity, making opaque the secrets and inventions that formed her family’s origin and, in parallel, much of this last century’s most beloved media. Exploding her own personal mythologies over a series of essays that graze topics as disparate as Gilmore Girls and Star Wars, Keane brings critical shrewdness to the vision-obscuring status quo of patriarchy.” —Sadie Dupuis, of Speedy Ortiz and Sad13, and author of Mouthguard 

"I'm not able to pin down my own life in essays as clear and beautiful as Erin Keane has here. But reading Runaway time and again, will be the learning and motivation I need. That we all do." — Kevin Smokler, author of Brat Pack America: A Love Letter to 80s Teen Movies 

From the Publisher

2022-06-01
The editor-in-chief of Salon analyzes her mother’s past as a runaway in the context of popular culture’s tendency to prioritize men’s stories over those of women.

When Keane’s father died when she was 5, he left behind a mystical presence that ignited her curiosity in a way her mother’s story never did. It wasn’t until she was an adult that she thought critically about the fact that her father was 20 years older than her mother, that her mother was 15 when they got married, and that, at the time, her father “had lost about a decade to heroin addiction.” When she finally grasped the nature of her parents’ marriage, she decided to interview her mother about her past as a runaway who lived under multiple pseudonyms after leaving home at the age of 12. Her mother told her harrowing stories about hitchhiking at a “thumbing station” in Aspen, going to jail in Boston, and surviving sexual assault in New York—a brutal ordeal in which “she saw and felt nothing but pain and horror.” In telling this family story, Keane interrogates her own long-standing fascination with the stories of questionable men: in Woody Allen’s Manhattan, for example, or the story “The Singing Bone” by the Brothers Grimm, or Luke Skywalker in Return of the Jedi. “A girl becomes visible to the world, stories like Manhattan taught me, when a man appears next to her in the frame,” writes the author. When telling her mother’s story, Keane’s prose soars, and her journalistic instincts shine. At one point, she finds a record of her mother’s arrest thanks to her connection with a particularly persistent archivist—clearly no small feat. However, the comments on popular culture often feel like an unnecessary detour from the main story, and it lacks the depth and feeling of the compelling autobiographical sections.

Though the narrative is uneven, Keane provides a lyrical, sharp feminist analysis of her family’s history.

Kirkus Reviews