To regard Francine Prose’s award-winning title list—she has written 23 works of fiction and nine nonfiction books—is to understand that some people really do know more, work longer, and write harder. Yet her first memoir, 1974: A Personal History, is imbued with an utter lack of self-importance.
In 1974, the self is a lens through which the light of the world can pour, as well as its darkness. Prose pairs her merciless scrutiny of that era’s misogyny, moral compromise and sexual liberation with a keen inquiry into her own motivations for dating the whistleblower Tony Russo, an anti-war activist both celebrated and vilified for helping to leak the Pentagon Papers, whose publication proved that the federal government had lied about the length, scope and reasoning for American involvement in the Vietnam War.
Reflecting on the young woman that she had been, Prose wrote, “I tell myself that not everyone is born with a conscience, that our moral sense can develop at any age.” In an epoch characterized by both apathy and outrage, we need the reminders that her and Russo’s example provide: “Even if you couldn’t do much, even if the chances were that most of what you did would eventually be undone, you still had to try.”
KMY: In 1974, you wrote that Tony followed Kennedy’s famous call to action. “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” Then as now, there are divergent, heated and contradictory notions of what it means to be a patriot. How do you think Tony’s example influences our current notions of what it means to be a patriot?
FP: Our current notions are wrong because they’re so malleable and distorted. If one would have asked Tony, he would have said, “The Constitution. Read the Constitution. Read the Bill of Rights. What is in there are the principles on which our country is founded.” But of course, there were a lot of horrible mistakes made. It was still a slave-holding society, and there were the massacres of Indigenous peoples. But nonetheless, the very existence of a Bill of Rights—which is a rare thing—is not in every country. He believed in the best of American democracy. And that’s what’s being lost.
KMY: It’s certainly a challenging time. I did not expect to see women’s rights to reproductive health care rolled back, though it was only 50 years ago that women needed to have a man countersign for a checking account. Did you time 1974 for its 50 year-anniversary? I wondered, what have you seen in those 50 years? Are you surprised by what you’re seeing happening to the rights of women?
FP: I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am. Misogyny has always been there, the oppression of women has always been there. But when things get better, you tend to think that they won’t get worse again. After Roe v. Wade, I thought, Well, that’s settled. In the book, I do talk about having to lie to the doctor to get birth control pills because it was illegal in Massachusetts to get birth control pills unless you were married. Now, shockingly, they’re trying to make it illegal in some states to get birth control pills. There were many things you had to pretend and lie and accept your subservience, which I thought was over. I really thought it was over.
KMY: In 1974, you portray the constant stream of belittlement that you received as a woman, even from those who decided to uplift your work, like the publisher of your debut novel. You also highlight a certain disregard that you had for the psychological and emotional needs of the men in your life, whether your ex-husband or Tony. Do you think it was misogyny that conditioned you to consider these men as beyond need of your care, or was there something else at play?
FP: A big part of it was about just being young. So much of the book is about the time I was living in, and yes, it’s about Tony and the whole political situation, but just by virtue of being young, you don’t consider other people. It’s such a hard job deciding who you are and who you’re going to become, and what life you’re going to live, that you almost don’t have—what we would never say then—the bandwidth to really take other people’s feelings into account. The young are selfish—not all of them, of course—but I think it goes with the territory, along with a kind of determination and stubbornness.
Of the belittlement that you were talking about…at the time, it was so normalized that a publisher would say to me, “You didn’t write this whole book all by yourself, did you?” It was awful, but it didn’t even seem that weird. It was the kind of stuff that men got away with saying. There was a certain amount of anger involved at being patronized, at being condescended to, and it tended to work itself out in sometimes unhelpful ways. It would not have been helpful to say, “What do you mean, you idiot? I wrote this entire book all by myself.” He was my publisher. But it would get displaced. The nearest available male got to suffer for what I had to deal with then.
KMY: One of the things I found really interesting in your narration of your conversations with Tony was how many questions you seem to have for him and how few questions he seemed to have for you.
FP: I couldn’t help noticing how quickly the subject changed from me to him, and of course, that still happens. I’m a big fan of reality TV shows. The reason I watch them, or claim to watch them, is because they seem closer to a picture of reality than a lot of other things that I’m seeing, and the way that women are treated, and the way they’re disregarded, and the way that they’re patronized seems again not to have changed that much but just…buried beneath the surface.
KMY: I put out an open call on social media for readers to send in questions for you, and this one comes from the poet Suzanne Bottelli: I’m curious about how you came to write the various ways women can be aware of our intellectual and physical power, even when we are materially and socially ignored, marginalized, and devalued. What comprises that power? Is it intimacy or cold observation? Where and when did this mysterious paradox first begin to interest you?
FP: That’s a good question. My mother was a doctor—there were two women in her medical school class—but I got to see this complete double standard at home. Because if my dad said it was raining outside, and it was sunny, she would say it was raining outside. I was exposed to it very early, but it still happens.
In 2000, I wrote a piece for Harper’s called “Scent of a Woman’s Ink.” I asked one of the heroic Harper’s interns to do the stats of how many literary wars were reviewed in literary circles, which were worse than I thought. The title came from this quote from Norman Mailer, where he said [something like], “I could always feel the ink of the womb,” and “it’s quaint and domestic,” the usual string of insults. I thought, stupidly, that people were going to thank me, that they were going to say, “Oh, my God. You know, I hadn’t noticed.” Which a few people did. But then I was denounced, and people said, “You just completely torpedoed your career.”
KMY: For my memoir, I’ve been studying this pagan mother goddess Cybele throughout the Roman Empire. I read your mythography/biography of Cleopatra and was so interested by the ways that her power has been siphoned from her story and sexualized in a way that ignores the extraordinary diplomacy of her navigation of those treacherous times. I really appreciate your correction of the record.
Writing the book was a revelation to me, coming to grips with who I was and who I am.
FP: Thank you. She ran a very diverse, complicated, large, powerful country. And what’s she remembered for? She was the lover of Mark Antony and Julius Caesar. Or she was Elizabeth Taylor having a big fight with Richard Burton on screen. Well, the gap between those two things is so obvious.
KMY: Perhaps because of that, I admired your self-indicting candor and—I say this in the happiest of ways—the shameless freshness of your recognition that the presence of sex was haunting your conversations with Tony and haunting your motivations for being in relation with this tormented man.
FP: A tormented man with whom I was having bad sex. It’s hard to write about sex because of intimacy and embarrassment, but also the fact that the language has been co-opted by porn. There’s a passage that, even though I wrote it, I actually like. Every sentence begins, “I wish I could say it was the kind of sex that…” Because I’m saying, it’s not that. It was one of those great days where I did the paragraph, and I was done for the day. Like, I was on my way to the refrigerator.
But it was very much in the air. Sexual liberation was different. I think with Hinge culture and Tinder culture, for women in particular, there’s a strange mixture of a kind of freedom and bravado and saying, “I can do what I want. I can meet a guy online and have a one-night stand.” But then a residue of puritanical guilt keeps creeping up. We didn’t have the guilt. Our mothers had the guilt. The ’50s were like, you cheat on your husband, and oh my God, the world falls apart. By the ’60s, it was not such a big deal, although that was a lie. It certainly was. A lot of people got hurt very badly. Some of them by me.
KMY: The freedom to be callous, right? That has long been the purview of men, but to take it on as a woman is not to subvert the patriarchy—it’s to reify its values.
FP: Absolutely. I keep coming back to this—the whole idea of youth. The stuff I did in that book, I would never do now. It wasn’t just riding around with some crazy, charismatic guy in the middle of night in San Francisco. At the end, he was my friend, and the fact that I walked out at a very critical moment, not in a gazillion years would I do that now. I wouldn’t. In fact, if one of my children or grandchildren did that, I would think, Did someone raise him wrong?
There was something about being young, being fragile, being aware of my tenuous grip on my own sanity, identity, stability. The shock of finding this envelope full of letters from guys I ghosted! The trouble of writing about yourself is that you find out stuff you didn’t know, or particularly like. I’d always thought of myself as a nice person. It turned out there had been times when I wasn’t.
Writing the book was a revelation to me, coming to grips with who I was and who I am. My husband’s my first reader, and he said to me, “You’re going to have to like that girl more.” And I went, Whoa. I went back, and I had much more sympathy for my own choices, my own areas of blindness, or my own limitations, or…the difficulty of being a woman in her twenties.
KMY: It’s ongoing. As women, we expect more from women, and so it doesn’t surprise me that you would have shown more sympathy for this selfish, chaotic, and negligent man than you did for yourself.
FP: How you are at a certain age is not necessarily how you’ll be—I mean, talk about things that I wish I’d known! You can ride around in the car with this guy, but in four years, you’re going to have a kid, and your life is going to settle into this—I’m knocking on wood—basically stable, basically pleasant routine. After all that chaos. I wish I’d known. I don’t know what I would have done differently, but it would have been nice to know.
KMY: Quoting Tony, you wrote, “There was no way they could undo the Pentagon Papers.” Later, he said, “The reason I felt such joy was that I was being true to myself. I remember thinking that people who work solely for their paycheck or for personal power would never know that feeling,”
You wrote, “In those days, people often talked about being true to themselves. But by 1974, what they meant by truth was beginning to shift from the collective to the individual, from political action to personal fulfillment. My truth, they began to say.” What did these rambling, hallucinatory, nocturnal car rides with Tony teach you about being true to yourself?
It’s hard to write about sex because of intimacy and embarrassment, but also [because] the language has been co-opted by porn.
FP: He really gave everything. He went to jail. He’d had this big career as an aeronautical space engineer and then a data analyst and an economist. He was hired by RAND, which was a big deal, and they sent him to Vietnam, and he saw that it was a nightmare. He saw what we were doing, and his conscience wouldn’t let him not do something about it. When Ellsberg came along and said, “Well, I have these papers that prove the government’s been lying,” Tony was willing to do whatever it took, which was a huge personal sacrifice. He could have gone on in that trajectory, and he’d be running NASA. But he was so profoundly shaken by what he saw in Vietnam, and so determined to do what he had to do. Without question. That was partly what was so interesting and attractive about being around him. He wasn’t calculating. He wasn’t looking to be successful or famous or anything. He just wanted to stop this war, which was what we all wanted.
KMY: Were you being true to yourself in his presence or only after?
FP: What I was doing was listening. Not for one second did I think, “This guy’s the love of my life.” That was never it. I had been very involved in antiwar stuff, and here was this guy who not only had been very close to the heart of it in many ways—the fact that he’d been to Vietnam, the fact that he was involved in the Pentagon Papers—but could talk about it, and would talk about it, in a way that it was something that I’d known from a certain remove. I’d gone to demonstrations and made posters—but he’d gone to Vietnam, and he’d gone to jail, and he really put himself on the line. And also, it was the truth. It was not his truth. It was the actual truth. He’d met these actual prisoners. He’d seen these actual bombings. It was not like he was discovering something within himself. This is what he’d seen.
KMY: In novels, much of the sleuthing that occurs through the narrative is a way of showing how the future is conditioned by the past. There’s this constant need to go back and map, like if we can only find the source, then all will become clear. As I’ve grown older, I’ve become distrustful of this constant impulse that we have as novelists. I’m not sure it’s true.
FP: It’s ridiculous. Just Freudian. It’s like, Oh, you found the trauma in your past that explains everything—No! No. I’m writing a novel now, and one of the only things I like about it at this point is that it seems to be about people’s essential unknowability. You just don’t know people. It’s not that easy—that now I’ve got the reason why everything happened to you. In some cases, it’s obviously true. People who suffer severe trauma will be acting it out forever, or trying not to. But I don’t think even that explains everything.
People are very, very complicated. In some way, I’ve always been writing about that. It’s certainly true in 1974. I mean, who was this guy?