The Female Picaresque: Jan Kerouac’s 'Baby Driver'

Halfway through her 1981 autobiographical novel, Baby Driver, the story of her hectic, careening life as a young bohemian woman traveling through North and South America in the sixties and seventies, Jan Kerouac calls herself “a gum wrapper in a whirlwind.” In this moment, Kerouac has just decided to move from Santa Fe, where she’s been sleeping with local politicians for money, to work as an escort at a poolside men’s club in Phoenix. It’s one impulsive decision in a long string of them, and although the remark seems tossed off and casual, it perfectly captures the whole chaotic course of her wayward existence.