Born in Albany, New York, Janet Michelle Kerouac is the daughter of the novelist Jack Kerouac and his second wife, Joan Haverty, but her early life was dominated by her father's refusal to acknowledge her as his daughter and by her mother's quest to obtain legal recognition for her. Much of Jan Kerouac's adult life prior to the publication of her autobiographical novel, Baby Driver, was spent searching for the father she scarcely knew, and her own writing grew out of that same need to place her existence within some family tradition. Suffering the consequences of the freedom promulgated by her father's books, Jan Kerouac has come to speak with a peculiar insight into the relationships between Beat literature and the lifestyles it engendered. Her own literary voice is more essentially "beat," in the sense of burdened with disillusionment, than that of many so-called Beat writers.

Kerouac spent...