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Francine Prose is the author of twenty-one works of fiction including, the highly acclaimed Mister Monkey; the New York Times bestseller Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932; A Changed Man, which won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize; and Blue Angel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her works of nonfiction include the highly praised Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer, which has become a classic. The recipient of numerous grants and honors, including a Guggenheim and a Fulbright, a Director's Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Prose is a former president of PEN American Center, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College.
Francine Prose's website
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You open your novel A Changed Man with a character most of your
readers probably have never met: the ex-skinhead Vincent Nolan. Was this
"changed man" the inspiration for the book?
I certainly began with him. I was on the subway in New York once, and I saw
these two very young skinheads -- all dressed up, with jackboots and shaved
heads -- and I noticed that they looked terrified, like they'd been dropped from
Mars. It was very clear to me that they were out of their element; this was not
their home territory at all. That made me curious about who they were and what
kind of people they were. Then I began to do research.
It's strange how life imitates art. Later I was in an elevator in Manhattan,
and there was a middle-aged guy with his hair growing over tattoos on his head
-- it looked as if a swastika had been there, and the laser removal hadn't done
a good job. I thought this is my character, 10 years later.
Were there other topics you were keeping in mind as you wrote?
My aim was to write about this character, but I wasn't necessarily writing
about neo-Nazis. I was writing about what it means to be a good person, what it
means to change -- and how our culture hypes this change, this growing. As I...
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