Part memoir, part handbook, part survey of the contemporary literary scene, Joan Frank’s Because You Have To: A Writing Life is a collection of essays that, taken together, provide a walking tour of the writing life. Frank’s aim is to form a coherent vision, one that may provide some communion about realities of the writer's vocation that have struck her as rarely revealed. Frank offers what she has learned as a writer not only to other writers, but to those to whom good writing matters. Her insights about "thinking on paper" are never dogmatic or pontifical; rather, they are cordial and intellectually welcoming. Original, witty, and practical, Frank ably steers us through the journey of her own life as a writer, as well as through the careers and work of other writers. Her subjects range widely, from the “boot camp” conditioning of marketing work to squaring off with rejection and envy; from sustaining belief in art’s necessity to the baffling subjectivity of literary perception and the magical books that nourish writers. Frank’s personal journey is wonderfully told, so that what in these essays is particular becomes useful and universal.

Because You Have To: A Writing Life

Literature & Fiction

FRANK,Joan

Essays & Correspondence

University of Notre Dame Press

Miss Kansas City is the story of an improbable friendship, set in the tumultuous mid-80s dotcom California, where youthful greed and blinkered innocence arrive intertwined. Friendless and reclusive, Alex Blue commutes two hours each way to a job that serves mainly as a place to bide time, until one day she meets the wealthy, worldly―and married―owner of a high-concept Bay Area lifestyle company. Meanwhile, the melancholy and closeted Morton Levi, yearning for a loving partner but stung by prior experience, lives a secret life outside the software information company he manages with a steady, efficient hand―the same company where Alex works. As ominous rumors of mergers and layoffs swirl, and Alex and Mort are pushed to the emotional brink by the vagaries of love, they find themselves forging an unexpected alliance. Miss Kansas City is a moving exploration of the notion of possibility, and of a seasoned hope that can emerge on the other side of loneliness and loss. Joan Frank is the author of the story collection Boys Keep Being Born, which was both a Bay Area Book Reviewers’ Award and Paterson Fiction Award finalist. Her stories appear in many journals and anthologies, including The Antioch Review,The Iowa Review, and Salmagundi. She is a MacDowell Colony and VCCA Fellow, Pushcart Prize nominee, recipient of a Barbara Deming Grant, and winner of the Iowa Fiction Award and Emrys Fiction Award. She lives in Northern California. Miss Kansas City is her first novel.

Miss Kansas City (Michigan Literary Fiction Awards)

Literary

University of Michigan Press

This is the original book from 1979 it was created in Britain and printed in Spain.

Beauty of Jewelry

Random House~trade

Joan Frank--a frequent contributor to Ms, Cosmopolitan and other major magazines--presents the unvarnished truth for women facing midlife issues: aging, singledom, work, children, complicated marriages, and more. With wit and sensitivity, Frank offers comfort and advice for women desperately trying to make sense of their 40s and 50s.

Desperate Women Need to Talk to You.

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Borgo Pr

Lately, time seems to have taken on an amusing eternal quality. Outer-space time, quick-and-never; a slow wheeling of which Melinda, moving at whatever speed, is more and more aware she has been accorded the briefest, briefest slice. She finds herself now moonwalking through the strange region of not young, not a mother, not married, unlikely to marry. She will have to work until she dies. She will have good friends who'll keep an eye on her, of course; some of them women much like her. She will float toward and finally past the margins of sexual viability, and never have enough money for a facelift.In Boys Keep Being Born, Joan Frank's subject matter is stark; her style, wry and lyrical. Her characters ask point-blank questions of the lives in which, willingly or not, they find themselves. The answers they devise—or settle for—may surprise you.

Boys Keep Being Born: Stories (Volume 1)

United States

University of Missouri

Through the authorâ€™s travels in Europe and the United States, Try to Get Lost explores the quest for place that compels and defines us: the things we carry, how politics infuse geography, mediaâ€™s depictions of an idea of home, the ancient and modern reverberations of the word â€œhotel,â€� and the ceaseless discovery generated by encounters with self and others on familiar and foreign ground. Frank posits that in fact time itself may be our ultimate, inhabited placeâ€"the â€œvastest real estate we know,â€� with a â€œstunningly shortâ€� lease.

Try to Get Lost: Essays on Travel and Place (River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize)

University of New Mexico Press

Curious, ruminative, and wry, this literary autobiography tours what Rachel Kushner called "the strange remove that is the life of the writer." Frank's essays cover a vast spectrum--from handling dismissive advice, facing the dilemma of thwarted ambition, and copying the generosity that inspires us, to the miraculous catharsis of letter-writing and some of the books that pull us through. Useful for writers at any stage of development, Late Work offers a seasoned artist's thinking through the exploration of issues, paradoxes, and crises of faith. Like a lively conversation with a close, outspoken friend, each piece tells its experience from the trenches.

Late Work: A Literary Autobiography of Love, Loss, and What I Was Reading

Biographies & Memoirs

Beauty of Jewellery

See notes

"Desperate Women Need to Talk to You," originally a headline for an advertisement for phone sex, was spotted one day by author Joan Frank. Marveling at the irony and bluntness, Frank thought of the similarity to her own life: woman desperately trying to make sense of midlife. She decided to tell all. With both wit and sharp-hewn honesty, Joan Frank tackles the big and little issues facing the enormous number of women rounding the corner into middle age: our longing for the fountain of youth; that we can no longer eat whatever we want without getting fat; the decision to have children or not; the perils of pantyhose, and the agony and ecstasy of entering a new relationship.

Desperate Women Need to Talk to You

Community & Culture

Conari Pr

EXCERPT Because of course she feels what he feels. . . . People their age natter along not copping to it but the awareness is billboarded all over their faces―a wavering, a hesitation, even those who used to crow and jab the air. The tablecloth of certainty, with all its sparkly settings, has been yanked, and not artfully. It's why people drink. All The News I Need probes the modern American response to inevitable, ancient riddles―of love and sex and mortality. Frances Ferguson is a lonely, sharp-tongued widow who lives in the wine country. Oliver Gaffney is a painfully shy gay man who guards a secret and lives out equally lonely days in San Francisco. Friends by default, Fran and Ollie nurse the deep anomie of loss and the creeping, animal betrayal of aging. Each loves routine but is anxious that life might be passing by. To crack open this stalemate, Fran insists the two travel together to Paris. The aftermath of their funny, bittersweet journey suggests those small changes, within our reach, that may help us save ourselves―somewhere toward the end.

All the News I Need: a novel (Juniper Prize for Fiction)

Short Stories & Anthologies

University of Massachusetts Press

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