Molly Prentice. (Photo contributed — Elizabeth Reitzel)

SANTA CRUZ — Writer Molly Prentice explores many topics in her new novel, Old Flame, through the perspective of protagonist Emily. Prentice’s first book since her 2017 debut, Tuesday Night in 1980, explores new motherhood, female friendships, capitalism, support systems for women, nostalgia, migration, I am considering traveling abroad.

Many of these are subjects that Prentice has experienced first-hand, and she will be participating in a discussion on “Old Flame” hosted above all by her mother, Nikki Silva, at the Bookshop Santa Cruz on Thursday.

It will also be a homecoming of sorts for Prentice. Prentice grew up with her family and two other families in a communal living environment in La Selva Beach, attending Gateway School and Aptos High School, graduating in 2002. Since then, she now lives in Red Hook, New York, but still visits family in Santa Cruz “at least a few times a year.”

Prentiss has always had an interest in writing, and that interest took off when he embarked on a tour across Latin America with his sister at the age of 22.

“We didn’t have any goals or goals other than simply traveling and seeing the world, but then I realized that I was really longing for some purpose,” she said. “I also wanted to catalog what I had seen.”

During this trip, Prentice was able to start his own blog and write his first novels and essays. She also attended graduate school at the California Institute of the Arts, where she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing.

Prentiss loves that writing helps her make sense of the world and unlock life’s mysteries.

“I love being able to see something, experience something, do something with it, and turn the experience into art,” she said. “I also love language itself.

2017 saw the publication of Tuesday Night in 1980, a New York art critic, an Argentinian oil painter, and their common denominator as they try to make it in Manhattan’s growing art scene in the early ’80s. The story of the Muse was told. The book received rave reviews from The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, and Carcass Review, was nominated for the Fiction Center First Novel Award and the Penn/Robert W. Bingham Award in the Debut Novel category, and won the Grand Prix of American Literature. was also selected as a finalist for

When Prentiss wrote his first novel, he spent seven years on “Tuesday Night.” She had a contract with the publisher for her two books, and she felt obligated to publish her second book, and she wrote the manuscript, but eventually was rejected. After that, she basically “started from scratch” and wrote the first draft of her work that would eventually become “Old Flame” in a garden shed on the grounds of her home. It was a renovated old one-room school building. House.

The book was finally published two years later. Prentiss was delighted to be able to write the book on his own terms rather than as a contractual obligation.

“Knowing I had to publish a book was certainly a strange state of mind,” she said. “It wasn’t the right conditions for me to create, so it really had to come from somewhere else. It came from my own desire to write about something, and it was the only way I could produce this second book.”

“Old Flame” tells the story of Emily, a Bay Area woman who moves to New York City and finds a job as a catalog copywriter for a major department store. Emily’s best friend and her colleague Megan is fired and the two go on a trip to Italy, where Emily unexpectedly finds out she is pregnant. While embarking on her motherhood journey as well, she’s made an effort to explore the structure of her relationships that she’s built and how they’re truly enduring, whether it’s with Megan or her boyfriend Wes. Start looking to see if it’s something.

Prentice based much of “Old Flame” on her own experiences. She also moved from California to New York, where she holds a similar office job in the Big Apple, and at the time she was writing this book, she was a new mother herself.

“There was a lot I gathered from my own experiences, and also about female friendships and the importance of women’s connections and relationships when other support systems are not supporting them during pivotal moments in their lives. I wanted to write a book about it,” she said.

“Old Flame” also explores the concept of family in all its forms and nostalgia for the old days. During her stay in Italy, Emily visits her former professor, Renata, when she was studying at the University of Bologna, and she meets her now-teenage adopted daughters, whom Emily babysittered during college. This leads Emily to explore her relationship with her own adoptive mother.

Prentiss plans to discuss the book during a conversation with her mother at the Santa Cruz Bookstore. NPR listeners will know Silva as one of her two “Kitchen Sisters,” a Peabody Award-winning show in which she and Davia Nelson explore a lesser-known piece of history. You may be Silva was also the curator of the Santa She Cruz Museum of Art and History.

“On this book tour, I decided to have conversations with people I really wanted to talk to who shaped my artistic identity and sense of self,” Prentice said. “Of course, my mother is one of them, so I’m really looking forward to it.”

Prentice wants “Old Flame” to act as a mirror that reflects what people go through, such as having children and caring for them.

“I hope this broadens and deepens the way women see their experiences, and that putting those experiences purely on paper makes some sense,” she said.

The free event will be held on May 4 at 7:00 pm at The Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz.To register, please visit Bookshopsantacruz.com/molly-prentiss.

“Old Flame” published by Simon & Schuster is for sale.