Caroline Preston

Caroline Preston’s girlhood fascination with her mother and grandmother’s scrapbooks led eventually to her latest book, The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt. Set in the 1920’s, this historical coming-of-age book is a new and intriguing subset of graphic novels. Caroline discussed this book’s creation with me on Writers Voices.

In high school, she started collecting antique scrapbooks. At Dartmouth College, she majored in American Studies, and she received a master’s in American Civilization from Brown University. Inspired by her interest in manuscripts and ephemera, she worked as an archivist at the Rhode Island Historical Society, the Peabody/Essex Museum, and Harvard’s Houghton Library.

Caroline is the author of three previous novels. Jackie by Josie, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, was drawn from her (brief) researching stint for a Jackie O. biography. Gatsby’s Girl chronicles F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first girlfriend who was the model for Daisy Buchanan. In The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt, she drew from her private collection of vintage ephemera to create a scrapbook-like novel.

Caroline has been awarded a Massachusetts Artist Foundation Fellowship and has had residencies at Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Ragdale, where she is a Distinguished Artist.  She lives with her husband, the writer Christopher Tilghman, in Charlottesville, Virginia and has three mostly grown-up sons.