"It’s not going to be forever. That comes through the book.” Prose says she’s delivered those thoughts when asked to speak at high school graduations, too.going through now, it’s not going to be forever. That comes through the book.” Prose says she’s delivered those thoughts when asked to speak at high school graduations, too.
     Everything seems so crucial as teen and loss is magnified. I had a friend who killed himself at 15 because of a bad grade. What Prose does in the book is write from the perspective of the young girl Nico (yes, named after the tragic Velvet Underground singer, whose music and life factors in the book), but, as is suggested from the smart word choices, she is not 13 when she is writing this. We find out later she’s all grown up and looking back at this intense, fraught period … which has become more and more a distant memory. As always happens. But we always forget.
   “The characters occurred quite a while ago,” says Prose. “ I started writing the book in the aftermath of my own mother’s death in 2005, I was barely getting through the day. I knew my whole story was about loss and a family, but I hadn’t been able to write it, I couldn’t understand the intensity of what I wanted to write about [until her mother’s death]/ The emotion in it is so raw. I wanted to write about adolescence and  grief. It’s fairly complicated and it’s a difficult state of consciousness. One thing I notice in life and how it affected my writing is no one prepares you for this in adolescence: loss, first love … It’s uncharted territory every single time.”
     What Prose started with for “Goldengrove” was this: “I had seen this image of a family standing on the shore of the lake and I knew fairly early on what was going to happen in the beginning, a tragedy. That was never in question.” She wasn’t sure if she wanted to keep the narrative in Nico’s voice or use others, but decided I wanted the intensity of her voice, I didn’t do anything to dilute it.”
    Nico must cope with her parents coping – their alienation, her mother’s retreat into drugs, her father’s possible affair. She must cope with the curious advances (or are they?) of Aaron, the boyfriend of her dead sister, Margaret. As Nico and Aaron are doing this odd dance of getting to know each other, Nico starts wearing Margaret’s clothes, adopting her “wordly” sophistication. Might this lead to love or disaster? And, how can this family ever escape the spectre of their dead child-sister?

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