1974 : a personal history / Francine Prose.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

"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.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

In 1974, Prose's (Mister Monkey) first novel had just come out, but her marriage and hopes of an academic career had shattered. Nothing felt certain: the Vietnam War, Prose's own self-doubts, and more. So she traveled cross-country to San Francisco where she roomed for a while with a couple of free spirits, who introduced her to their friend Tony Russo. He was an activist and Daniel Ellsberg's accomplice in the release to the press of the Pentagon Papers. Tony was 36, and she was 26. For a few months, they were a pair. But exposure and prison had driven him into permanent, paranoid radicalism. When Prose's second novel was published, she went back East, and he followed. But by then, he had become unable to distinguish between reality and fantasy. After a few painful meetings, Prose left Russo and never saw or talked to him again. In this memoir, 50 years later, she thinks of who she was then and is now and discusses failing someone who needed a friend. VERDICT A moving tale, from an expert storyteller, about growing up.--David Keymer

Publishers Weekly Review

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)

Booklist Review

Novelist and critic Prose brings all her artistry and astuteness to her first memoir. Prose was 26 in 1974, with one novel published and another on the way. She fled grad school and her husband in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was staying with friends in San Francisco when she met Tony Russo at a poker game and was instantly intrigued with this shambling antiwar hero. Formerly a "respected and highly paid engineer, economist, and data analyst," Russo leaked the Pentagon Papers with the more polished and charismatic Daniel Ellsberg. Russo was out of work, haunted, agitated, and elusive. He invited Prose along on high-speed, late-night drives, during which he would rant and brood. Interspersed with Russo's wrenching story are incandescent tales of Prose's daring adventures in Mexico, India, and Afghanistan. She recounts her struggle to understand Russo and herself with breath-catching candor and reflects with keen insights on the timbre of that questioning time, the slipperiness of memory, and what we choose and refuse to perceive in others (and reveal and conceal about ourselves). With Hitchcock's Vertigo as a touchstone, freshly relevant ruminations on the antiwar and free-speech activism of the 1970s, and illumination of the first steps in Prose's dynamic writing life, this is a rueful and affecting look-back.

Kirkus Book Review

The veteran author gets deeply personal in this revealing memoir. Now 76 and channeling Hitchcock's Vertigo, Prose, the author of more than 20 books of fiction as well as a number of biographies, recalls a turbulent year in San Francisco, where the movie was set. She left her husband and dropped out of school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to work on writing her third novel and spend time with a rebellious, charismatic man named Tony--i.e., Tony Russo who, with Daniel Ellsberg, leaked the Pentagon Papers. In this year of tarot cards, the I Ching, and Gravity's Rainbow, the young Prose sought "spiritual aridity," to "feel the thrill of not knowing or caring where I was going or what I was supposed to be doing." She admired Tony and what he had done, calling him "antiwar royalty." The author was wavering between recklessness and terror, safety and disaster. Prose also recalls the Cambridge days, when she and her husband weren't getting along, smoking pot--over the years she did a number of drugs--ordering Chinese takeout, wondering what she was going to do. They lived in Bombay for a time, and she read a lot, especially García Márquez and Dinesen, and wrote her first novel: "It was like being in love and better." After traveling widely, Prose returned home, rewrote the novel and found a publisher. She wrote another and headed off to San Francisco, often visiting key places in Vertigo like a destination tourist. The author goes into great detail about Tony and his background with RAND and the complexities of their relationship. Writing about herself, she has learned things she doesn't necessarily want to know. Some readers might wish there had been more about her books and her development as a writer. Maybe later? Joyful and sad nostalgia offered up in spades. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.