Francine Prose

Everybody has, at least once, skimmed books or passages for plot, whether it was a school reading assignment or choosing a book to read. However, we never actually read between the lines, scrutinizing each and every word. In her book Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and For Those Who Want to Write Them (2006), Francine Prose provides the handy guidebook to writing and reading because ultimately, “reading morphs into writing.” She uses passages as examples from the masters of classic novels and analyzes them, showing readers the different techniques of “good writing”.

Prose is the acclaimed author of fourteen fiction books, a recognized critic and essayist, and an aficionado for reading and writing. Not only does Prose devote her time to writing, but she also tries to inspire and encourage her students while teaching universities including the New School and Bard. Francine Prose currently lives in New York with her husband and two sons.

Hearing Francine Prose read her own work was like looking into the machinery of a clock, and understanding her thinking process. Francine Prose manages to not only give us a comprehensive reading of her short story, “Hansel and Gretel,” but also a glimpse of her personality and childhood during the Q&A. She reads “Hansel and Gretel” with steadiness and care, giving quick glances at the audience. The protagonist and narrator, Polly, and her husband Nelson plan an impromptu honeymoon to Vermont, where she meets Lucia, Nelson’s former mother-in-law, who is like the witch of the children’s tale of Hansel and Gretel. Hansel and Gretel, Nelson and Polly respectively, eat mushroom for dinner while seeing bats fly by the window, an atmosphere that clearly defines an evil witch waiting for children to devour. Francine Prose’s writing is concise and direct. She does not fluff her prose with superfluous details. Her verb choice for dialogue was always the neutral “said”. At times, she displays her witty humor, which she started off right from the beginning. She began her story by telling the listeners of a sex scene between a woman, Lucia, and her cat – an unexpected scene that catches the listener’s attention immediately, as evident by the audience’s light chuckle.

Francine Prose was honest and candid when it came to questions. Her Hansel and Gretel short story was actually a true story that had happened to her, although she did not know it did when she wrote it twenty years ago. She comes to the conclusion that when writing fiction, we “borrow things from our life.” When writing a short story or a novel, Prose never thinks through to the end. She writes as her ideas come up and the ending is always random and unexpected. When asked by a fellow classmate to name an author she hates, she chuckled and never gave the audience an author she hated. Instead, she answered, “It’s up to you to figure out why a writer stays around for one hundred, two hundred years.” France Prose seemed very approachable and friendly, direct and humorous while openly answering the audience’s questions as they asked somewhat personal questions and also questions pertaining to the short story reading. She even admits to reading because she was “bored”. She says reading is a “pressing desire to escape…with an interest in how far a book could take me from my life and how long it could keep me there.”