Publishers Weekly
★ 04/08/2024
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. (June)
From the Publisher
"Deeply felt and devastatingly confessional, this brave personal reckoning isn’t easy to forget.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Prose brings all her artistry and astuteness to her first memoir… a rueful and affecting look back." — Booklist (starred review)
“A moving tale, from an expert storyteller, about growing up.” — Library Journal (starred review)
"In this, her first memoir, Prose succeeds where many before her have failed, enlivening — without demonizing or idealizing — the valiant, creative, idealistic movement that almost brought capitalism down. The era Prose profiles under the title 1974 produced crucial social advances, and did collateral damage to those, such as Russo, who were driven mad by the effort required. Fortunately for us, that period also yielded the best book yet by the wildly prolific, astonishingly talented Francine Prose." — Los Angeles Times
"Captivating…. With its fraught, late-night conversations about secrets and regret—most of which take place in a big American car hurtling down San Francisco’s rain-slicked streets —1974: A Personal History often reads like a heady film noir set amid the ashes of ’60s idealism." — San Francisco Chronicle
“Prose deftly zigzags through the pop-culture touchstones of her youth, throwing everything from Vertigo to Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night into dialogue with a chaotic period of both her life and American history.” — Vulture
"Award-winning Prose writes her first memoir, setting it in the ’70s and detailing her relationship with activist Anthony Russo, of the Pentagon Papers fame. She was in her 20s, driving around San Francisco at night, hearing his theories and stories, and forming herself as an artist—and coming of age in a radically changing world." — Library Journal
“Prose’s memoir of course reflects her own experience, but like all memoirs, it also offers a snapshot in time, in this case a tumultuous period in U.S. history…. Prose brings a sharp lens to her shortcomings…. This is among the many reasons Prose is widely admired as a writer. She spares no one, including herself. Intentionally or not, with this book she is making the case that she was indeed meant to be a writer.” — Washington Post
“Prose’s first memoir makes something dark and dizzying of a tumultuous decade.” — New York Magazine
“Deeply personal…revealing….Joyful and sad nostalgia offered up in spades.” — Kirkus Reviews
“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
"Francine Prose's 1974: A Personal History is a reverberating account of a time—the point in the early 1970s when the revolutionary energy of the 1960s had been replaced by futility and paranoia—and of a character, Tony Russo, who exemplifies that time. The constraint of history and character gives the book a novelistic intensity and focus, with, as a bonus, a three-dimensional portrait of the author on the threshold of adulthood." — Lucy Sante
"Through the prism of Vertigo, in a spellbinding memoir, Francine Prose resurrects her misbegotten San Francisco romance in 1974 with one of the two men who stole and published the Pentagon Papers, the one who went to prison for it, the one driven mad by the lies of Viet Nam. A hypnotic portrait of a lost time when people lived and died for the truth." — John Guare, playwright, Six Degrees of Separation and A Free Man of Color
"A stunningly alive portrait of the artist as a young woman, set during that dizzying time when the hopeful love-fest of the '60s morphed into the murky violence of the '70s. Reporting from both coasts, Prose laser-focuses on her relationship with indicted Tony Russo who had helped leak the Pentagon papers, the outrageous Patty Hearst kidnapping, drugs, sex, and the omnipotent Vietnam war. A fascinating travelogue of the tremendous changes in both a country and a personality struggling to find their best selves. Heartbreaking, haunting and indelible." — Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You and Days of Wonder
“Francine Prose’s sublime, haunting memoir shows us the Seventies in all its dizzying contradictions—the darkness and paranoia, the open roads and strange new connections. A world where some voices disintegrated, never to cohere again—while others - emerged, brilliant and searing, out of the calamity. Poignant, mesmerizing, profound—1974 offers revelations not just about the Seventies but about our world today.” — Danzy Senna, author of Caucasia and New People
"In this wonderfully clear-sighted memoir Francine Prose catches a moment when idealism shifted and the world turned. 1974 is also a story about youth, risk and survival - a story women don't tell often enough, perhaps. Wise, achieved, entirely satisfying." — Anne Enright, author of The Wren, the Wren
