The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt

 
The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt
by Caroline Preston

Ecco
2011

 

 

Although it would end up shelved with literary fiction in any bookstore, The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt is truly a graphic novel, written like a diary and illustrated with collages of vintage ephemera. The effect is a book that looks like it was hand assembled by its narrator.

 
Frankie is a young woman from small-town New England and an aspiring author. Her scrapbook covers about 8 years of her life, from the summer after high school graduation in 1920, through her college years on scholarship at Vassar, and her attempts to make a living as a working writer, first in Greenwich Village and then in Paris.

 
Frankie struggles with money and her art in ways that are familiar in this sort of coming-of-age story. At key moments of need, she befriends other women, and draws support from their advice and aid - wealthy libertine roommate Allegra in college, stylish 'spinster adventuress' Lorraine on the steam ship to France.
 

Frankie also struggles to figure out what she wants from love. She has a fling with an older man before college that shapes her approach to romance and has other effects on her life downstream. In Greenwich she dates Allegra's handsome brother. She has another fling in Paris, then returns to her hometown when her mother gets sick, and reconnects with a surprising old flame.

 
Along the way, Frankie is at the periphery of key 1920s events, witnessing the founding of The New Yorker, reading Ulysses, meeting a handful of literary celebrities, hanging out with the Left Bank ex-pats in Paris, and meanwhile working for the sort of prestige-less popular magazines that paid the bills, even if they're rarely remembered today.

 
If this book were just text, I don't know if I'd have read it, and I doubt I'd like it as much as I do. It's really elevated by Preston's collages, which remix magazine illustrations, sewing patterns, newspaper clippings, greeting cards, old photos, and fortune-telling cards in a way that's not quite like any other graphic novel I've seen.