~from Ami

My paternal aunt married into Ken Kesey's family during the sixties. I grew up hearing his name, thinking he was part of the Trinity or maybe a minor prophet.

Close.

Two things mattered in my family: religion and books. You can easily understand how I became confused about Mr. Kesey. But once I discovered who he was, a relative of a relative who'd written The Book, one of America's great novels, I was mesmerized by my immediacy to literary fame.

My dad wrote books too, but nothing could make an English teacher's jaw drop like finding out a Kesey was in their class during the short time my Kesey cousins attended the same Arkansas school as I did.

I started to write, all the time feeling the cold that lingered there in the shadow of Ken Kesey. Could anything of mine ever compare? My first novel, a mystery set in small town Arkansas, will come out next month.

"It's no 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,'" I told my dad last week as he looked over my author's copy.

"What?" he said. "What's that mean?"

"It means I can't live up to Ken Kesey," I said. "Not with this book."

"And why would you be trying?"

It came as a surprise to me that no one in my family was thinking of Ken Kesey when I sold my book. Maybe it's the pressure I put on myself, this constant ache to prove something, to be the best. . . and falling so short.

I'm no Ken Kesey.

But I would like to read his book, which I've never gotten through before. I would like to try it again, not to compare my writing with his uncomparable style, but to get a feel for the part of the literary landscape he occupied. That same landscape that has allowed me to be included. I see us both on the same map, looking at each other from opposite ends of a continuum, raising our glasses of green Kool-Aid in a toast of recognition.

I don't feel I'll ever shake his ghost.