Lauded as “a female on tHe road,” Troia: Mexican Memoirs is one of the most extraordinary works
of Beat literature that was produced by a woman.
Nancy Grace writes, “Troia stands apart as a memoir that in form and content may be the most
troubling and provocative of the Beat female life
stories.” The title comes from French slang meaning “whore,” derived from a negative association
with Helen of Troy, but it also means “adventuress.” The memoir was republished in London as For
the Love of Ray (1971), a more appropriate title that
reflects the motivation for Frazer’s struggles. Sadly,
it has been out of print since the first edition, but
it continues to be considered an underground masterpiece by Beat enthusiasts and scholars.
brenda frazer started writing the book as a
series of letters from March to November 1963 to
her husband, Beat poet ray bremser, while he was
serving a prison sentence in New Jersey. Her editor,
Michael Perkins, arranged the material into a fourpart narrative. A section of the book was published
in 1967 by the literary magazine Down Here, which
was put out by the Tompkins Square Press. Ann
Charters’s Beat Reader (1992) excerpts the opening pages of the memoir; Frazer credits Charters
with reinvigorating interest in her work. Brenda
Knight’s Women of the Beat Generation (1996) includes the same section that Charters used, along
with part of the book’s introduction. Another selection from Troia appears in the fifth edition of
The Heath Anthology of American Literature (2006).
Work on a prequel and a sequel to Troia was begun
several years ago. The trilogy is tentatively entitled
“Troia: Beat Chronicles.” Part of the first book of
the trilogy, “Breaking out of D.C.,” was published
in Richard Peabody’s A Different Beat: Writings by
Women of the Beat Generation (1997).
Beat scholars have often asked, “Why were
there no female Kerouacs?” The general answer
is that women of the time were silenced through
incarceration and the social restraints of postwar
U.S. society. But Frazer’s memoir defied the times.
It is a candid examination of her life as a prostitute,
an occupation that she feels forced to take in an
effort to support her husband and their daughter,
Rachel. Frazer asserts, “I thought that I was doing
a revolutionary thing. . . . I felt righteous about
being a prostitute. I felt like what I was doing was
more honest than free love. . . . I thought prostitutes needed a spokesperson.” The memoir rejects
middle-class moral codes and disfigures the codes
of pornography to become a text of resistance
against the conformity of what has come to be
known as the “containment culture” of the American 1950s and early 1960s.
Influenced by the prose of jack kerouac and
the poetry of her husband, Frazer created a work
that allowed her to become part of the Beats’ “boy
gang” that she admired. Frazer says, “If I sound like
Kerouac, it’s because I tried to. I read him while I
was writing.” But she was also one of the handful
of female Beat artists who gave a much-needed
woman’s perspective of her times. Her masochism
and subservience to Ray mirrors the sacrifices that
women were expected to make in the dominant
culture. What truly separates Frazer is her affinity
for a lifestyle of risk rather than a lifestyle of security. Troia is ultimately a more radical text than
On the Road. It shares with Kerouac’s novel the
desire for solidarity with the indigenous people of
Mexico. Unlike Kerouac’s On the Road, where the
protagonist reenters society, Troia ends with Frazer
embracing life on the bohemian streets.
Bibliography
Grace, Nancy M. “Artista: Brenda (Bonnie) Frazer.” In
Breaking the Rule of Cool: Interviewing And Reading
Women Beat Writers, edited by Nancy M. Grace and
Ronna C. Johnson, 109–130. Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 2004.
———. “Snapshots, Sand Paintings, and Celluloid: Formal Considerations in the Life Writing of Women
Writers from the Beat Generation.” In Girls Who
Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation, edited by Ronna C. Johnson and Nancy M. Grace,
141–177. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University
Press, 2002.
Hemmer, Kurt. “The Prostitute Speaks: Brenda Frazer’s
Troia: Mexican Memoirs.” Paradoxa 18 (2003): 99–117.
Kurt Hemmer