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.
"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