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An Unsuitable PrincessA True Fantasy | A Fantastical MemoirJane Rosenberg LaForgeFine Art by Mary Ann StrandellPRAISE for An Unsuitable Princess“In An Unsuitable Princess, Jane Rosenberg LaForge, a Los Angeles native, combines imaginative narrative and personal memoir to show how her own coming-of-age was warped by her hometown’s peculiarities, particularly the constant, confusing mashup of glittering fantasy with the complex urban reality that, ironically, provides the fantasy with vital context and support.” Read the entire review… –Necessary Fiction “LaForge mercilessly pinpoints the awkwardness, difficulties and perceived failures of a teenage self desperate for the trappings of success – clothes, joints, a date for the prom, a proper boyfriend and above all a role at the fashionable Renaissance Pleasure Faire – and who feels certain that everyone else her age is prettier, sexier, and having more fun… But at a time when YA literature is full of romantic young teens romantically dying of romantic cancer, LaForge honestly charts her own inability even to know what to say to a dying boy – her apparent callousness, a mixture of fear and denial – and ultimately the exhaustion, guilt and shame of grief.” Read the entire review… – Katherine Langrish, Seven Miles of Steel Thistles “What really struck home about An Unsuitable Princess, however, is that it’s a book about regret and a plea for forgiveness…. LaForge’s memoir culminates in an ‘if only’ moment, which sank into the earth of her imagination and blossomed into a lovely story about isolation and rejection and the redemptive power of loyalty and love. … LaForge’s real-life regret echoes backward through her fantasy, working magic on the reader, illuminating the depths of a story that, until you reach that pivotal moment in the memoir, seems to be merely a light fantasy about a young man in love with a mute outcast.” Read the entire review… – Guild of Dreams “Jane Rosenberg LaForge’s An Unsuitable Princess is a daring combination of old-school storytelling and the true wit of the best of contemporary memoirists. The first of these is a fairy tale about a young woman who cannot speak, while the second tells of the author’s awkward coming of age within the shadows of a disintegrating Hollywood neighborhood. But it is when these two narratives prove themselves inescapably linked that the novel takes its most affecting turn. ‘Tell me the story of your life,’’ the author’s daughter asks, and so the author does, with both hilarious and heartbreaking repercussions. ‘Finally,’ the author writes, ‘I am famous.’” –Michelle Hoover, author of The Quickening “It’s two, two, two tales in one. On your left, a deftly told Early Modern horsey fantasy; on your right, an aching memoir of the authorial teenage Ren Faire trauma that begat the tale. Rosenberg LaForge has crafted a quirky and compelling new class of literary mashup.” –Jess Winfield, co-founder, Reduced Shakespeare Co. and author of My Name is Will: A Novel of Sex, Drugs, and Shakespeare “Rosenberg LaForge lays out her dreams and desires in this tender and heartbreakingly candid reinvention of memory. An Unsuitable Princess is an entirely original look at life, personal history, and one’s original hopes.” –Kate Southwood, author of Falling to Earth ABOUT THE BOOKAn Unsuitable Princess: A True Fantasy/A Fantastical Memoir tells two stories simultaneously. In the first, which takes place in Renaissance England, a mute stable girl of mysterious talents and potentially dangerous parentage finds herself punished for saving the life of the boy she loves. The second story, told through a series of footnotes to the first, is situated in the late 20th Century and explain the inspirations for the first story. An overly talkative, solidly spoiled, middle class girl muses on the social and economic phenomena the author observed while growing up in Hollywood during the birth of the hippie movement, the sexual revolution, women’s liberation, and the growth of Renaissance England re-enactments. She does not save the boy she thinks she loves. Indeed, she may have hastened his death. Even years later, the only way she can acknowledge this failure is by spinning an elaborate fantasy that becomes the tale of a wretched orphan who turns out to be a princess. The Rumpus Interview with Jane Rosenberg LaForgeListen to an interview with JaneRead a 5-minute Review of Jane’s memoir |
Jane Rosenberg LaForge was born in Los Angeles and raised in the suburb of Laurel Canyon, where she attempted to rub shoulders with the hip and famous. Though she was not successful in that endeavor, she rode horses, took ballet lessons, participated in the Renaissance Pleasure Faire, and graduated from Hollywood High School. After finishing her bachelor’s at UCLA, she worked as a journalist in California, Maryland, and upstate New York. She studied writing in the Kate Braverman workshops of the early 1990s in Los Angeles before attending the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. At UMass, she was a Delaney Fellow and a researcher for two of Jay Neugeboren’s books on the public health system, Transforming Madness and Open Heart. Since earning her MFA, she has taught college reading, composition, and literature part-time in the New York metropolitan area; published critical articles on African-American literature; and four volumes of poetry: After Voices (Burning River 2009); Half-Life (Big Table Publishing Co. 2010); With Apologies to Mick Jagger, Other Gods, and All Women (The Aldrich Press 2012); and The Navigation of Loss (Red Ochre Press 2012), one of three winners of the Red Ochre Press’ annual chapbook competition. She has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize (once for poetry, and once for fiction) and once for a StorySouth Million Writers Award. She lives in Manhattan with her husband, Patrick, and their daughter, Eva.