Writers write, but when the time came for author Caroline Preston to begin drafting her fourth novel, words alone seemed insufficient to tell the story she was imagining.
The story Preston wanted to tell was a familiar one: small-town girl escapes the small town for the big city. Big trouble and big adventures ensue. Simple enough. The thing was, Preston could see the world of her 1920s heroine, Frankie Pratt: the slope of her nose, the tiny silk flowers that made up her high school graduation corsage, the gleam of a spoon from a gift shop in the Eiffel Tower.
So Preston set about creating a scrapbook, one that would serve as a novel documenting Pratt’s journey from country girl to urbane flapper and beyond. The result is literal, literary and lovely. “The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt” is a novel Preston created from a handful of her personal mementos, more than 300 pieces of ephemera she purchased on eBay as well as archival photos from institutions such as Vassar. It’s all carefully assembled into an actual scrapbook, with small bits of narrative glued to the pages like stickers.
Although other authors have experimented with the scrapbook format, Preston’s book is a visual journey unlike any other novel out there right now. Kirkus Reviews has starred the book as one of the best historical works of fiction in 2011.
Preston will talk about the book Monday at the Georgia Center for the Book in the DeKalb County Public Library auditorium in Decatur.
She is a fan of the graphic novel but did not set out to create one. Before she wrote her first book, “Jackie by Josie,” which imagined scenes from Jackie Onassis’ life, Preston was an archivist. She worked at Harvard’s Houghton Library and at the Peabody/Essex Museum in Salem, Mass. It’s that feel of physically handling remnants of the past that Preston sought to create with “Frankie Pratt.”
“The things we inherit from our parents, or just looking at an old magazine from when you were a teen, they stir up memories,” said Preston. “It touches us in a way that reminds us of our pasts.”
She began collecting bits for the book in 2009. A tube of Woodbury lipstick in Passion Flower Red. Special glasses for viewing a solar eclipse. Tarot cards. Charm bracelets. A button commemorating Charles Lindbergh’s trans-Atlantic flight. Even old scrapbooks. All of it went into boxes labeled for specific chapters. The book is divided into six, following Pratt from Cornish, N.H., to Vassar, then to a glittering but struggling career as a writer in Greenwich Village and Paris.
“My best stuff is from antique malls, you know the kind you find in those old quonset huts with 40 dealers inside,” Preston said.
Because her character goes to Vassar, the author also was given access to Vassar’s archives. From there came report cards, graduation tassels, freshman codes of conduct. To make each piece historically accurate, for example, Preston would photocopy material such as an original 1921 letterhead from Vassar, print it on old, yellowed paper, then type on it using an old Corona typewriter to create a “vintage” historical record. All of it was assembled into an actual scrapbook which was later photographed, page by page. It took 18 months to complete.
“I don’t have training in graphic art, so I did this by the seat of my pants,” said Preston who lives in Charlottesville, Va. “But it was fine because scrapbooks are done by amateurs, so it was OK if everything wasn’t perfect.”
It’s this attention to detail that gives the book an almost tactile quality. Because there is little text, the images convey the story, much the way an actual scrapbook would. And as such it’s a quick read, one that can be devoured in the course of a pot of tea on a cold day. But one a reader might pick up the next day just to look at the images.
Based on the success of the book, Preston is already working on her fifth volume. In many ways, she said, this form of “writing,” is more satisfying for her than composing pages and pages of paragraphs. The next story will be another scrapbook, this one set in 1959, about a young woman who is about to get married. Consider it like a prequel to “Mad Men.”
“I’m just cooking along here,” she said.
Already her home office with the big windows is scattered with boxes and growing piles of vintage Betty Crocker cookbooks, Nancy Drew mysteries, paper dolls, old Sears catalogs and an original Barbie doll.
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Event preview
Author Caroline Preston discusses her new book, “The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt: A Novel in Pictures.”
7:15 p.m. Monday. Free. Presented by Georgia Center for the Book, in the DeKalb County Public Library auditorium, 215 Sycamore St., Decatur. For more information: 404-370-8450, Ext. 2225; www .georgiacenterforthebook.org.
