Johnson builds this bittersweet and lyrical memoir from her relationship with aspiring Beat writer Kerouac in 1957. Johnson recreates her memoir from the confessional perspective that longs to be heard, and mentions Robert Lowell to emphasize this confessional element. The author “stands behind the text, controlling its meaning,” using “intentionality” (Anderson, 1988, p2). Johnson also uses his text as catharsis and "self-defense" in response to Kerouac's writings. (Lee, 2000, p.98) to reclaim the power he had ceded to Kerouac. Johnson selects a bleak passage from Kerouac's novel Bleak Angels, to illustrate his "hatred of women": "For that lumpy, coiled flesh with the juicy hole I'd sit through eternities of horror in gray rooms..." ( p.133). Johnson wants his “revenge on history” (Gusdorf, in Onley, 1980, p.36), to retrospectively break a “silence which I finally wish to give up”. “the poems that Hettie kept silent.” (p.262) connects Glassman's silence to the larger literary world in which women have been excluded from the male canon. Johnson writes in 1983 from the position of a seasoned feminist, psychologically analyzing how her relationship with Kerouac has stifled her identity and how women engage in consensual exploitation when they believe in “the healing powers of love as the English believe in tea…” (p.128). and the present tense for this memory adding immediacy, as if he now realizes that “He could somehow erase you.” (page 128). Glassman mistakenly imagined that he could cure Kerouac of his "blue-eyed and bruised" melancholy (p.128). In this memoir Johnson seems to favor Kerouac, introducing him first, but this is how his personality can be analyzed alongside Glassman's and found to be if desired. Johnson as an author uses Kerouac (as she seems to have used) to elaborate her psychological problems from 1957 to 1983. Johnson does more than tell, she uses double subjectivity to make the reader understand the two Joyces, the naive one who "put so much shadow ” (p.127) to attract Kerouac, and the “other” older woman who “wonders the same if it were true” (p.131), as the reader might be. Johnson demonstrates the “crucial link between author, narrator and protagonist" (Lejeune in Anderson, p2). All three coexist in the text, but none can be the real Johnson because, as Mandel argues, the autobiography "claims to be the author's entire life" but "is a construction" (1980, p..