Beatchik: Tales of Women in American Bohemia

by Jerrine Wire

I smoke with the people I want to get high with... This is a real ladies' tea party, Boston style. The bohemians, the flower children-the revolutionaries of the 20th century, who started a paradigm shift that would change America forever. Beatchik illuminates the untold stories of bohemian women who meet in Boston. They are poets, writers, painters, and world-changers... Justine, the artist/poet who works as a model and has an earth-shaking love affair...but marries another man to keep him out of Vietnam. Beth, the Philadelphia socialite at Harvard who drops out and marries the passionate, rough man who is exciting and dangerous to her. Adelene, the pot-smoking Kelly girl who leaves for Haight Ashbury and whose innovative intelligence makes her a successful entrepreneur of Silicon Valley. Freda, the wise oracular mother, who waits tables at a restaurant that caters to the police. Mena, the NYC runaway, and Laurel, the daughter of hippies, who is a genuine flower child. In the spirit of On the Road, this fascinating and stunning roman a clef celebrates the lives of these incendiary women, with a thin veil of fiction guarding their identities. They lived the free spirit of they were provocative, vulnerable, courageous, and magnificent. Beatchik is an engaging and eye-opening book that will resonate long after you have savored the final page.

260 pages, Paperback

First published July 29, 2014

Reviews

[Andre' Delbos · Rating 3 out of 5]

An emotionally honest Roman à clef, arranged in vignettes of the life of the author, her friends and acquaintances during the culturally heady times of the early to late 60's. Set primarily in and around Boston Ma., this is a story not just of the aspiration of youth, it is also the story of the after-after party and details the cleaning up after the guests have gone. "Those mystical satyrs and nymphs in their Dionysian fog may feel themselves above the mundane tasks of life, but then, who cleans up and takes out the garbage?" The answer is clearly the women.
Characters of many stripes, from celebrity poets to con artists appear in locations ranging from the Lower East Side of Manhattan to Cambridge's Harvard Sq., and both are imbued with a sense of excitement of their promise and the often quiet loneliness of their truth.
A counterweight to Duncan Hannah's "20th Century Boy" mixed with Ivan Gold's "Sams In A Dry Season." Recommended.