1974
A Personal History
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Jun 18, 2024
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- $14.99
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- Pre-Order
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
“In this remarkable memoir, the qualities that have long distinguished Francine Prose’s fiction and criticism—uncompromising intelligence, a gratifying aversion to sentiment, the citrus bite of irony—give rigor and, finally, an unexpected poignancy to an emotional, artistic, and political coming-of-age tale set in the 1970s—the decade, as she memorably puts it, when American youth realized that the changes that seemed possible in the ’60s weren’t going to happen. A fascinating and ultimately wrenching book.”—Daniel Mendelsohn, author of The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
The first memoir from critically acclaimed, bestselling author Francine Prose, about the close relationship she developed with activist Anthony Russo, one of the men who leaked the Pentagon Papers--and the year when our country changed.
During her twenties, Francine Prose lived in San Francisco, where she began an intense and strange relationship with Tony Russo, who had been indicted and tried for working with Daniel Ellsberg to leak the Pentagon papers. The narrative is framed around the nights she spent with Russo driving manically around San Francisco, listening to his stories--and the disturbing and dramatic end of that relationship in New York.
What happens to them mirrors the events and preoccupations of that historical moment: the Vietnam war, drugs, women's liberation, the Patty Hearst kidnapping. At once heartfelt and ironic, funny and sad, personal and political, 1974 provides an insightful look at how Francine Prose became a writer and artist during a time when the country, too, was shaping its identity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bestselling novelist Prose (The Vixen) documents a single, pivotal year of her life in her visceral debut memoir. In 1972, Prose fled Cambridge, Mass., her failing marriage, and an in-progress graduate degree for San Francisco, where she lived off and on for the next few years. "I liked feeling free," she writes, "alive and on edge, even a little bit afraid." In 1974, as 26-year-old Prose prepared to publish her second novel, The Glorious Ones, she met Tony Russo in San Francisco through mutual friends; three years before, Russo had been indicted alongside Daniel Ellsberg for leaking the Pentagon Papers. Dazzled by Russo's heroic reputation, Prose spent rainy winter evenings riding shotgun in his Buick, absorbing his monologues about Vietnam, the RAND corporation, and his shadowy enemies in government. She fantasized about taking their relationship, which had become sexual, into more explicitly romantic territory, though friends and tarot readers warned Prose that the affair would "end badly." After she returned to New York City to promote her book in the summer, that prophecy came true: she reunited with Tony in a disastrous episode that made her complicit in his public disgrace. Prose braids musings on the Patty Hearst kidnapping, Nixon's resignation, and other historical events into her finely wrought narrative, expertly using them to throw her own coming-of-age into relief against the dawning political cynicism of 1970s America. Deeply felt and devastatingly confessional, this brave personal reckoning isn't easy to forget.
