Review: 'Old Flame,' by Molly Prentiss

Emily, the narrator of Molly Prentiss' confident, bittersweet new novel, holds a day job as a copywriter for a Manhattan department store, lives in Brooklyn with her photographer boyfriend, and aspires to write fiction. The novel is unapologetic about this familiar premise; in fact, the novel highlights its familiarity in order to unpack it, often with acerbic humor.

Emily's interest in writing has nothing to do with fame-seeking and everything to do with the beauty and mystery of language. Here is Emily, in her office, after reading a poem: "the poem's … verbose list of life's succulent stuff … made me feel flushed with so much pleasure I began to see all the world as abundant and forgiving." By the time Emily finishes the poem, she says, "I was crying at my desk."

Over the course of the novel, Emily makes, damages and repairs multiple friendships. She meets her boyfriend, Wes, and gives birth to their daughter, Greta, whom she loves palpably. As much as this work is about friendships, relationships and motherhood, it is also a book about writing: the dizzying joy Emily feels when she writes, and her fear of insufficiency. "Maybe a woman's life could never be captured in words, or with a story. Maybe she was always going to overflow," Emily thinks.

She develops a rich and convincing friendship with her colleague, Megan, by writing fiction in response to Megan's visual prompts. Prentiss captures well the excitement of collaboration and how it engenders creativity.

Prentiss devotes considerable time to Emily's experience living abroad in Bologna, a place she remembers fondly (and to which she eventually returns). Much of her fondness has to do with her reverential regard for Renata, who is both her employer and professor during her initial trip. Italy is a pivotal place in Emily's personal history — it is where she once lived with Renata; it is where she learns she is pregnant; it is where she loses Megan, and where she sets out to find Megan again.

Perhaps most importantly, is allows her distance from her job, at which she excels, even if it pains her. "We were selling ourselves to ourselves," Emily thinks. "We could be any kind of women, we imagined, if we invested properly, and if we listened to our lies."

Emily already writes for a living; the question of what she writes, and what effect it has on the world, is as central to the work as all of her other relationships. The titular "old flame" appears, as a phrase, in relation to a conversation with Wes, but it seems clear that the flame is more than an ex-boyfriend. The flame is that incandescent potential Emily feels in earlier years, when the question What did you think you would be? could yield countless answers.

Jackie Thomas-Kennedy's writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, One Story, Electric Literature, Lenny Letter, Narrative, Harvard Review and elsewhere. She is a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Old Flame

By: Molly Prentiss.

Publisher: Scout Press, 307 pages, $27.99.