RUNAWAY

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.