On the 25th anniversary of her death, the novelist Jan, who was free-spirited and self-destructive like her father, has almost been entirely erased from his story

The King of the Beats, Jack Kerouac, was renowned for laying bare his life in more than a dozen roman a clef novels, his most famous being On the Road, which documented the birth, rise and final days of an enduring counterculture.

But while larger-than-life characters such as Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Neal Cassady wandered in and out of Kerouac’s works under a variety of pseudonyms, one important figure in the writer’s life is conspicuously absent: his daughter, Jan Kerouac, who died 25 years ago this week.