Runaway Notes on the myths that made me

Combining cultural criticism and family history, these essays from journalist Keane (The Louisville Anthology, 2020) enrich the growing body of work reexamining perceptions about art, artists, the past, and what matters. A question drives this collection: Who gets labeled a "missing kid" and who a "runaway"? The spectacular opening essay finds the author in a New York City hotel in 2015 writing about Woody Allen's film Manhattan, which features a man having sex with a teenager, a critical success and (she's now embarrassed to say) a favorite of Keane's. Mariel Hemmingway had just revealed real-life behavior of Allen's echoing the film's supposed fiction, which finally and permanently shifted Keane's understanding of the film. This shift begets another: Why did Keane's family stories focus on her father and not her mother, respectively 36 and 15 the year they met and married? Keane's mother was a "runaway" living alone in N.Y.C. at the time. Keane fact-checks her family stories, and while the lies told about her father are rattling, the erasure of her mother's story chills the bones. In intelligent, brave prose, Keane reconstructs her mother's story into existence and challenges readers to examine the gendered dismissal of those we call runaways.

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.)

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.