This time of year, I’m usually in my garden for an hour before I get to work. And I’m very hard on myself about not finishing until I reach a pretty high level. It’s my version of meditation, I suppose. I wake up very early, and with my first cup of coffee I do the Spelling Bee. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity. I reached Prose at her home in the Catskills to talk about morning routines, researching the Rosenbergs, and how the pandemic has reshaped her writing life. “There was originally much more of that novel, and eventually my editors said, ‘A little of that goes a long way,” Prose told me. In the midst of McCarthy-era fear and paranoia, Simon has to decide whether he’d rather have a clear conscience or a big leg up in the boozy, WASP-y, more-than-slightly boorish world of 1950s publishing.įor Prose, whose mother really did go to high school with Ethel Rosenberg, the pleasure of this novel lay in penning excerpts from the Red Scare fan fiction Simon is tasked with rehabilitating, excerpts that contain phrases like “estrous animal passion” and erroneous references to Greek deities. There’s just one catch: Simon’s mother is a childhood friend of Ethel Rosenberg and he feels nothing but sympathy for the accused spies. The book is set to make a commercial splash, and in an industry that’s not exactly hospitable toward Jews, it could provide Simon with much-needed bona fides.
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