The correspondence between them, collected in the new book "Door Wide Open," starts a few months after that first meeting, when Kerouac characteristically splits for Africa, then San Francisco, Mexico City and Florida. As he speeds from place to place, he sometimes asks my mother to join him, then abruptly changes his mind. "I admit I'm flipping and am bugged everywhere I go," he writes from Berkeley, Calif., distraught as each new place offers no refuge, no vibration, no new vision.

When "On the Road" was published late that year, the Beats quickly went from underground cult to mainstream cliché. But the success of "On the Road" only increased Kerouac's sense of isolation and despair, hastening his desertion from the cultural revolution he helped to invent. In the letters, he comes across as a mad, ruined genius, swinging between the "starrynight exstasies" of his writing binges and the squalid excesses of his alcoholic binges.

My mother's letters radiate precocious self-awareness and tenderness. She seeks to lure Kerouac closer without frightening him away with any hint of commitment, and she also tries to dissuade him from his "desperate, gluttonous drinking," his bitterness and the other demons that threaten to destroy him. "I remember the first party we went to last Fall," she writes. "You said, 'Protect me,' and I wanted to with all my heart, but didn't do a very good job, having all my old shynesses and especially my strange shyness of you."

I feel a kind of shyness approaching these documents. My mother's relationship with Kerouac ended six years before she met my father, painter Peter Pinchbeck, and eight years before my birth. There is something eerie about reading a parent's early love letters; it gives you a vertiginous glimpse into the accidental processes that led to your own creation. Covering a span of less than two years, the letters not only suggest huge worlds of possibility that my mother could have lived, they also make me aware of the various ways these distant events shaped my own consciousness.

I learned about my mother's relationship with Kerouac when I was an adolescent -- around the time my mother started work on her memoir, "Minor Characters." When I was a teenager, the Beats attracted me as a model of enthusiasm, adventure and community. It is incredible to me that I am now almost the same age that Kerouac was when he exchanged these letters with my mother. I still feel as if I am at the beginning of my writing road, and he was already nearing the end of his. (He died in 1969, in Florida, while watching daytime television, but his last years were unproductive.)

My mother's letters show her as a young writer trying to define her own voice, unable to follow Kerouac's technique of "spontaneous Bop prosody." She writes, "There's something in me that always says Stop when I'm about to lose myself and really go deeply in when I'm writing." My mother's literary aesthetic is not one of spontaneity, just as her lifestyle is not at all extreme. "I look at your way with wonder -- but there is nothing I can say about it, except that," my mother writes to Kerouac in Tangier, Morocco. "I move two miles downtown to a new job, not too different from the old one, and you move across the ocean to another continent!"

Actress Frances McDormand reads Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar"