Not women whose writings and biographies are so often cast in light of GKB – Joan Vollmer, Carolyn Cassady, Joyce Johnson – but women with their own incandescence. Instead they were actual people, independent, with literary muscle and verifiable floruits that have left enduring countercultural footprints. And not just hangers-on and molls and muses and homicides and sexualised shadows, as Ginsberg-Kerouac-Burroughs and their celebrants might have you believe. The occurrence of these names, 30 years after I first read Junky at age 17, provoked in me three thoughts: 1) Of these men, Burroughs was the only possible genius and the only sadistic sociopath 2) I lied about having read On the Road until I was in my thirties, when I finally got around to it, and now remember nothing about it except a brittle disappointment 3) Was the Beat Generation just a sausage party? Or were there women? Ginsberg-Kerouac-Burroughs: these are the principal names collocated to the period of American literary activity (and obscenity jurisprudence) that stretched roughly from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, and which of course became known as the Beat Generation. And: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. I reached the point where it was time to study Fiction and Poetry, American, Counterculture, 1950s. I will spare you the tedious details and foggy generalities of the endeavour, and remark only that I was duty-bound to examine the literatures of all cultures, eras and nations and, with a stern eye towards diversity, choose, purchase, catalogue and shelve 1,500 books that best fit the undefinable ideal of ‘important’.

My job, I was to soon find out, was to fill these shelves with ‘the most important books of all time’. It was simply a converted attic space with glassed-in gables at either end, a wood-burning stove, an attractive intarsia-work table and, most noticeably, dozens of shelves built into the walls – all empty. The curious thing about this library was that it contained no books. In 2010, in Austin, Texas, I was hired by a fellow to manage his private library.

Minor characters a beat memoir