| Abstract |
For her graduation from high school in 1920, Frankie Pratt receives a scrapbook and her father's old Corona typewriter. Frankie dreams of becoming a writer, and through a kaleidoscopic array of vintage postcards, letters, magazine ads, ticket stubs, catalog pages, fabric swatches, candy wrappers, fashion spreads, and menus, she narrates her journey in search of success and love. Once at Vassar, Frankie crosses paths with intellectuals and writers, among them "Vincent" (alumna Edna St. Vincent Millay), who encourages Frankie to move to Greenwich Village and pursue her writing. When heartbreak finds her in New York, she sets off for Paris aboard the S.S. Mauritania, where she keeps company with two exiled Russian princes and a "spinster adventuress" who is paying her way across the Atlantic with her unused trousseau. In Paris, Frankie takes a garret apartment above Shakespeare & Company, the hub of expat life. But when a family crisis compels Frankie to return to her small New England hometown, she finds exactly what she had been looking for all along. |
