In her first memoir, critically acclaimed, bestselling author Francine Prose recalls her brief, intense relationship with the activist Tony Russo during a year when our country changed forever.

“Remarkable . . . an emotional, artistic, and political coming-of-age tale set in the 1970s—the decade, as Francine Prose memorably puts it, when American youth realized that the changes that seemed possible in the 60s weren’t going to happen. A fascinating and ultimately wrenching book.”—Daniel Mendelsohn, author of The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

"Captivating. . . . Often reads like a heady film noir set amid the ashes of ’60s idealism."—San Francisco Chronicle

In her twenties, Francine Prose lived in San Francisco, where she met Tony Russo, who, along with Daniel Ellsberg, had been indicted and tried for leaking the Pentagon Papers. She and Russo spent their nights driving manically around the city while he chain-smoked and told increasingly wild and impassioned stories about working for the RAND Corporation in Vietnam and about his decision to become a whistleblower. Their affair ended in New York City, after a dramatic and deeply disturbing series of events that seemed to reflect the ways in which the idealism of the 1960s was being replaced by the harsh realities of the 1970s.

Touching on the preoccupations of that historical moment—the Vietnam war, the women’s movement, sexual liberation, drugs, the Patty Hearst kidnapping, and the Watergate hearings—1974 re-creates the unsettled climate of the era. At once heartfelt and ironic, funny and sad, personal and political, 1974 provides an insightful look at what it was like to be a young woman then, as it is now, and at the ways in which Francine Prose became a writer and artist during the years when the country, too, was shaping its identity.