And Now Introducing Mrs. Prose

Combine charisma, wisdom, and wit, and what do you get? Author Francine Prose. Her name certainly suits her profession and her personality shows how well she can live up to the surname of Prose. At a recent by her at Baruch College, she surprised the audience by sharing one of her earlier short stories instead an excerpt from her newest novel. Through it, she describes her writing process and in it, she reveals her skillful use language.

            The life of the main character of Francine Prose’s story Hansel and Gretel is based of her own life as a young woman. Not only does she subconsciously reflect her personality and experiences in her writing, but her personality also reverberates throughout her writing. Francine’s creativity, imagination, and daringness are apparent in the story about newlyweds who go to Vermont for a weekend. She describes the logic behind the actions of the young woman as doing important things out of a “lack of a reason not to.” But this carefree nature only skims the depth of her character. In the story, the woman’s husband has quickly become unable to be intimate after the marriage, and he admits to her that he has “episodes” that cause him to be the withdrawn, moody, and grieving person he has turned out to be. Thus, he decides they should travel to a farm in Vermont for an “impromptu honeymoon.” 

            As the story unravels, it turns out that Nelson has led them to visit the mother of the love of his life.  The young woman realizes that Nelson has misled her from the truth about his ex, Marianna, and Marianna’s crazy mother reminds her of a fairy tale witch, as does the farm house setting. Feeling depressed and isolated, the woman feels like she is in the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel. Chock full of imagination and creative use of detailed original language, the story uses sentences like “Striped by the sunlight filtering in through the gaps between the barn boards, Lucia and I regarded each other two zebras from different planets.”

            Whether in her speech or prose, one can never know what to expect next to come from Francine, except for fluid language filled with significant meaning. She explains that she chose to read Hansel and Gretel because of its theme of change. Twenty years after the shoddy trip to Vermont, the main character revisits it with her second husband to see some friends. The friends turn out to live close to where Lucia did. The narrator of the story then realizes that the future knocks on the other side of the wall softly, and she wishes she could have known back then what she knew now, that there was “physical evidence all around her that she would be saved” from the Hansel and Gretel scenario. When it came to Lucia, the “witch” holding her captive, “What would rescue her was time itself, and its inexorability.” Francine advises young people that they should be encouraged by the changes time brings about. This concept of change is apparent in her writing process. She will write one sentence and then another without even knowing where she is going with it, so the ending of her stories often surprise herself. Also, she rewrites and revises her writing all the time. For her recently published novel Goldengrove, she wrote over 130 drafts.

Her advice on change and editing are not the only bits of wisdom Francine Prose offers. She knows that writing depends on the demands of the author’s life and she admits she alternates between writing fiction and non-fiction because writing magazine articles, no matter how boring it may seem, can bring home the money. As she put it, “I didn’t have the luxury of writer’s block.” When asked why she chose writing as a career, Francine Prose explains humorously in honest humility, “I couldn’t do anything else. I can’t even drive.” So take the trains when she is on the road, and carry with you a copy of her recent novel Goldengrove.