Runaway: Notes on the Myths that Made Me Hardcover – September 27, 2022 by Erin Keane (Author)
$28.00

Runaway

Brand: Belt Publishing
Current Stock:
Release Date: Expected release date is Sep 27th 2022
Gift Wrapping: Gift Wrapping Available
Authors: Erin Keane

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Belt Publishing (September 27, 2022)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 250 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 195336831X
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1953368317
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.6 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.7 x 1 x 8.6 inches

 

From Erin Keane, editor in chief at Salon, comes a touching memoir about the search for truths in the stories families tell.

 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.

 Though 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 The Gilmore Girls, Runaway is an unforgettable look at all the different ways the stories we tell—both personal and pop cultural—create us. 

 

"This eagle-eyed inquiry hits the mark." —Publishers Weekly

"Keane’s prose soars, and her journalistic instincts shine." —Kirkus Reviews

"[This] memoir expands beyond the personal to cast that same piercing gaze on cultural myths, from the obsession with nymphets to the demonization of runaways. What results is a deeply felt family memoir that also functions as an exegesis of our social texts." —Lorraine Berry, Los Angeles Times

“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 

 

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 2018, she coproduced and cohosted the limited audio series These Miracles Work: A Hold Steady Podcast. She is editor in chief at Salon, where she has worked since 2014, and teaches in the Sena Jeter Naslund-Karen Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University.

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