I felt like the stories were a little too meandering to be read as standalone essays as it seems like they were intended. I wish it was either a regular memoir or organized into sections by topic. Just when we’d move into a topic beyond her mother and father’s relationship for a bit, you’d turn the page and there was another essay about it. I know parts were published elsewhere but that doesn’t mean you can’t organize them in a way that made sense. The essays were fine but it was repetitive and circular to read.

I was very interested to read the author’s investigation into her mother’s true story because most of what she had been told were fabrications. However, it had to be teased out in the first few chapters. I wanted to read her parents’ stories so I skimmed her lengthy analysis of Woody Allen films and other comparisons.
The author also tended to judge society of 50 years ago with a modern microscope, which is unproductive, in my opinion.
Her mother’s story was incredibly interesting, basically living by her wits as a runaway as a 14 and 15 year old.

This memoir "ran away" with me! Writing about family is never easy and Keane manages to tell the story of her family without harming the heart of her family, covering tough times sans salaciousness. Her journalistic chops are evident in this book, so this one's for you if you like a well-research memoir (Think in lines of Lilly Dancyger's NEGATIVE SPACE and less that Henrietta Lacks book).

An editor at Salon, with an expansive yet forensic style, Erin Keane explores her mysterious parents and her upbringing in a sprightly, relevant memoir, "Runaway: Notes on the Myths that Made Me." Her mother ran away for the first time at the age of 13. It was 1970, just after the peak of flower power. I was fifteen years old then and longed, some days, to run away, but I was dutiful and never did. Erin Keene's mother did and over the next two years survived and flourished in America's cities. Then at age fifteen, she married a thirty-six-year-old man, Erin's father. The father died when the daughter was five and she grew up among family secrets and myths. Runaway digs into the past while interrogating the cultural props the author employed during her youth, interrogating, for example, the movie Manhattan reviewed after the revelations of #MeToo, and The Gilmore Girls.
Yes, Runaway retells her familial story but it also shines a light on the most ancient of questions: who tells our stories and why and how? Heartily recommended.

Runaway is Erin Keane's memoir about digging into her family's history and uncovering truths about her parents.

3.5/5

Thanks NetGalley and Belt Publishing for this e-ARC.

Erin Keane's memoir on finding out the truths in her family is one that is interesting. Generally, memoirs focus slightly more on the individuals that write them. In this case, Keane's memoir focuses a lot more on her mother, who was a runaway. I appreciated that she took pains to make contact with organisations and people who could help her connect the dots. It mustn't have been easy, and the work she's put in to this memoir is a testament of her professionalism.

I found the cultural commentary a bit off. Thematically, they were on track and totally in sync with her mother's history. However, it felt very divorced from the narrative at times. It didn't feel very much like a memoir rather than a biography of her parents, so I think calling it a "memoir" feels very much like a misnomer. I wish there were less commentary and more family history.