Francine Prose on neurotic motherhood and the perils of reading your own reviews
In Francine Prose’s latest novel, “A Changed Man,” Bonnie Kalen, a foundation fundraiser, surprises her teenage boys with a thirty-two year old Neo-Nazi whom she invites into the home in the same way some people might welcome a stray puppy. And like a stray puppy, Vincent Nolan, the skinhead in question, is looking for a reprieve from his wild early ways. But stray humans need not camp outside Prose’s door. “It’s not tendency of mine,” Prose says of Bonnie’s compulsion to open her home to a stranger. “My husband (the artist Howie Michels) says that his father was always bringing home strays of one sort or another, but that was not something I did.”
That fictional leap wasn’t enough keep Prose from identifying with her characters. “Everything I know about neurotic motherhood went into Bonnie,” Prose cheerfully confesses, “and there’s plenty, believe me.” The mother of two sons—both now grown—Prose spent the early part of her writing career augmenting her novelist wages by writing pieces on “How to Get Your Kids to Eat Vegetables.” That is, until her sons told her to stop. “Having kids was so transformative in that way, going from a reasonably calm person into this worried wreck, as if overnight.”
Prose published her first novel in 1973, after “failing out of graduate school. It was life-saving. It was the only thing I could do.” Yet, even after more than a dozen books and numerous awards and acclaim, the publication process has always rattled her. “In general,” she admits,”I’ve been saying that publication is the punishment for writing, but so far—and I’m knocking on wood—the experience (with “A Changed Man”) has been so whatever-the-opposite-of-punitive is. But its nerve-wracking because you do feel a little bit like the dream in which you are walking around having forgotten to put your clothes on. Its that kind of vulnerability.” And it’s not just the bad reviews that sting. “In the past I’ve surprised at how a good review can make you just as unhappy as a bad one. But people have been getting the book, they’ve been understanding what I’ve been trying to do. It makes me feel very encouraged about having gotten across what my intention was.”
That fictional leap wasn’t enough keep Prose from identifying with her characters. “Everything I know about neurotic motherhood went into Bonnie,” Prose cheerfully confesses, “and there’s plenty, believe me.” The mother of two sons—both now grown—Prose spent the early part of her writing career augmenting her novelist wages by writing pieces on “How to Get Your Kids to Eat Vegetables.” That is, until her sons told her to stop. “Having kids was so transformative in that way, going from a reasonably calm person into this worried wreck, as if overnight.”
Prose published her first novel in 1973, after “failing out of graduate school. It was life-saving. It was the only thing I could do.” Yet, even after more than a dozen books and numerous awards and acclaim, the publication process has always rattled her. “In general,” she admits,”I’ve been saying that publication is the punishment for writing, but so far—and I’m knocking on wood—the experience (with “A Changed Man”) has been so whatever-the-opposite-of-punitive is. But its nerve-wracking because you do feel a little bit like the dream in which you are walking around having forgotten to put your clothes on. Its that kind of vulnerability.” And it’s not just the bad reviews that sting. “In the past I’ve surprised at how a good review can make you just as unhappy as a bad one. But people have been getting the book, they’ve been understanding what I’ve been trying to do. It makes me feel very encouraged about having gotten across what my intention was.”
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