From 1972 until 1975, I lived, for months at a time, in San Francisco. There was no reason for me to be in California, except that I liked it there, and because it was across a continent from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I had left my husband and dropped out of school and never wanted to return. In those years, I often chose a place to live because it was as far as possible from the place I was escaping.

I’d stay in San Francisco through the fall and winter, then leave and go back to New York to see my family and friends, then return out west. I lived in the Inner Sunset district, not far from Buena Vista Park, in a sunny apartment with two roommates, a couple I’ll call Henry and Grace.

California might have felt like a long vacation in limbo if I hadn’t begun to think of myself as a writer. One perk of being a writer was that I could tell myself that I was working even when I wasn’t. I liked to think I was becoming a person on whom, as Henry James said, nothing was wasted. It sounded right, but I wondered about following James’ advice because he and I always felt so differently about the characters in his novels. Did he really want me to side with his hapless innocent marks when his amoral scoundrels were so much more charismatic?

I liked thinking that my job description was to watch and try to understand who people were, to intuit what they’d been through, what they revealed or tried to hide, what they said versus what they meant. The challenge was to find the right sentences, the right words, the right punctuation to get it down on the page.

Meanwhile I was at that stage when time and the body are signaling the unconscious: If you are going to make stupid mistakes, you should probably make them now. Everything seemed like a matter of life and death and simultaneously inconsequential. Everything broken could be fixed. Everything that was incomplete could be finished, or anyway, so I hoped.

I knew that my life and the world around me were changing, that something was ending and something else beginning, but I was too close—too inside of it—to have any idea what it was.

I’d known Henry and Grace for a long time, and I liked them a lot. Henry was a high school friend of my soon-to-be ex-husband’s, and he’d lived with us for a few months, in Massachusetts, where he had come to get out of the draft. Then he’d moved back to San Francisco.

The first time I crossed the country and rented Henry and Grace’s sunny guest bedroom through the fall and the mild (compared to Boston) Northern California winter was in the summer of 1972. I’d been in flight from Cambridge, where I’d become unable to leave my apartment without consulting the I Ching, the Confucian Book of Changes.

It says something about me and my friends, about the era in which we lived, that so many of us owned a copy of the I Ching. With its dove-gray Art Deco–design dust jacket, it looks like an edition that the Woolfs and Hogarth Press might have published. Written centuries before Christ, the book contains a system of divination based on a stack of six parallel lines, straight or broken, each corresponding to an image (the Lake, Fire on the Mountain) and a paragraph of poetic philosophy and vague advice. You ask the oracle a question, and it answers via a hexagram derived by passing yarrow stalks from hand to hand or flipping three coins.

In those days, I believed, or wanted to believe, that the future could be foretold. Maybe it’s only human to want to see what lies ahead. The freedom to dabble in the occult went along with the other freedoms we claimed for ourselves: the freedom to believe, simultaneously and without irony, in astrology, in evolution, in the power of great art, and in Engels’ ideas about the origin of the family. Necromancy seemed like a semi-logical declaration of independence: If we didn’t believe the answers we got from our parents and teachers, we’d look for new explanations in mysticism, polities, Eastern philosophy, and drugs.

We suspected our elders of blindness and greed. We took nothing they told us on faith. We agreed not to trust anyone over thirty, but we made exceptions for Picasso, Chuck Berry, and Jeanne Moreau. We were determined to figure things out for ourselves. We were our own science experiments, researching the paranormal. Who could say that ancient thought systems might not hold the key to the future? Millions of people still had faith in these methods of fortune-telling and divination. Could they all be wrong?

I read tarot cards. I cast the I Ching. I had a friend who could guess someone’s astrological sign after talking to them for five minutes.

People consulted the I Ching for many reasons, often for permission to do what they planned to do anyway: Should I sleep with my husband’s best friend? Undertaking brings good fortune. Remorse disappears. Most of us had only a vague idea of the oracle’s history and significance, but I think it did us good, or some good, to read the eloquent Confucian text and its fall-back message: Perseverance furthers.

Some people took its advice more seriously than others. A friend called to say she’d been terrified by an ominous hexagram. We agreed: It’s only a book! I was ashamed to tell her that I couldn’t leave my apartment in Cambridge without its reassurance. Often I had to root around in the couch cushions to find the pennies I needed to cast a hexagram.

Maybe it was a kind of OCD, like having to touch the doorknob a certain number of times before I could open the door. But this was before we knew the acronyms that now so readily come to mind when we evaluate our own mental health and diagnose our loved ones.

Now someone as compulsive and unhappy as I was then would probably be medicated. But I was too proud or stubborn or shy to look for a name for my problem. And psychopharmacology was nowhere near what it is today. We knew people who took Valium, mother’s little helper—who wanted to take that? Weed and psychedelics were fine, speed and coke in moderation, but pills had been invented to turn housewives into zombies. Junkies had a kind of social cachet, an aura of doomed romance, but we worried when our friends drifted into hard drugs; by then, a few people I knew had overdosed and died.

I suppose there was a kind of instability, what we would now call bipolarity, in the way that, during those years, I veered between periods of paralyzing dread and times of being dangerously trusting and even indifferent to danger. For months, I’d see myself as a rebel and an outlaw, and then, in the months that followed, as someone hiding in a corner or looking for a corner to hide in.

I was afraid that the needle would keep swinging between those extremes, or that it would stop on one side or the other. What I was working toward, what I hoped, was for my psyche to stay intact, bouncing comfortably in the middle between recklessness and terror, between safety and disaster.

In Cambridge I’d had an imaginary psychiatrist, a hostile university health-services doctor, a middle-aged man with the dark-rimmed glasses, white lab coat, and graying hair of a family doc on TV. When I try to remember how I pictured him, I see Henry Kissinger’s face.

During the conversations—the sessions—I had with him in my mind, the imaginary doctor told me that I’d given myself agoraphobia by repressing my desire to walk away from graduate school, my husband, my apartment, my life. I imagined agreeing but arguing (weakly) in my defense that I hadn’t planned on moving around the corner from a section of Kirkland Street that had apparently been designated as a safe space for flashers to park their cars and expose themselves to the women who walked by. I can still see the men’s expressions when I saw what they meant me to see, the cruel goofy smiles or hard stares that said: Now we have a secret.

Farther up Kirkland Street was the supermarket where Julia Child was best friends with the butcher. Sometimes I passed the famous couple on the street: the gangly, chatty celebrity cook and her attentive husband. But the market was one of the places to which, as the circle of dread contracted, I was afraid to go. First the English department, then my classes, then anywhere beyond my apartment, anywhere but my bed.

The summer I left Cambridge, my husband spent a month in California. The plan was that he would come back, and we would switch. I would go out West and return before school started again.

That summer, when he was gone, there were violent thunderstorms every afternoon. Four, four thirty. Every single day. There was nothing to do but wait them out. What if the neighbor’s dead willow tree was struck by lightning and fell on our house? Sometimes the electricity failed, and I’d pull the blankets over my head.

My imaginary health-services psychiatrist said, “You’re living a life meant for someone else.”

He (that is, I) was right. This wasn’t my real life. I was not really a graduate student. I was not really a graduate student’s wife. I wasn’t married to my husband. I wasn’t actually falling in love with every damaged eccentric I met. I was not actually cheating on my friend with her boyfriend.

I was just pretending to be all those things, to do all those things. But knowing all that was useless unless someone could show me the real life, the true life, the life I was meant to live—the life that I was looking for when I went to San Francisco.

Henry and Grace had a beautiful bright apartment, on the second floor of a two-story wooden-frame house. An outside flight of wooden stairs led up to our door from the sidewalk. Our bedrooms had large windows looking down on Parnassus Avenue. Behind our backyard a lushly forested hill rose up to Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute. I liked telling people that I lived on the grounds of a mental asylum, especially after I felt sane enough so that it seemed like a joke and not a disguised cry for help. A curtain of fuchsia blossoms with their pink and purple ballerina skirts, their dangling white legs and yellow pollen shoes, parachuted into our back garden.

Henry and Grace were glad to split the rent, and we established a congenial household. A couple and a single person living together can bring out everyone’s best behavior. We survived on avocado sandwiches on San Francisco sourdough bread with mayo, black pepper, and alfalfa sprouts. On special occasions we ordered delicious plantains and roast chicken from the Ecuadorean bodega that accepted the food stamps that Henry took me to apply for at the FDA office as soon as I officially moved in.

Food and rent were cheaper then, and the lower cost of living gave people—by which I mean childless young white people—a freedom and mobility that we never had before and have never had since, except for the very rich. If you didn’t like your apartment or your city, you could go somewhere else. Someone was always driving somewhere; someone always had a spare bedroom or a reasonably comfortable couch. You could write a book review, you could tend bar, you could be a waitress, work in a store, you could be somebody’s studio assistant and pay the bills. And you could stay with friends as a guest for much longer than you could couch surf today. The confluence of cheap rent, youth, and transience meant that guests often stayed for absurd lengths of time, forever poisoning their relationship with the host. My friendship with Henry had barely survived the months he’d stayed with us in Cambridge. Later I would stay for months with filmmaker friends in a Soho loft, and another few months with friends in a farmhouse outside New Haven.

I talked to Henry and Grace about finding a place of my own. Friends who lived in communal houses in the Bay Area invited me to rent one of their extra rooms. But I remained at Henry and Grace’s, which meant establishing the shallowest roots—no lease, no paperwork—that I could put down. I always knew that I would return to New York, where I had grown up, where my family and closest friends lived, and which I still thought of as home.

There were always plenty of people around the Parnassus Avenue apartment. Henry’s college friends from Reed, Grace’s childhood pals, and a group of artists, musicians, and inventors who had carved ingenious lofts and studios out of the Reno, a massive abandoned hotel south of Market Street. The hotel was built in the previous century for professional boxers and tunneled throughout with hollow shafts designed to give them a steady infusion of fresh air. The structure had been condemned by the city, but the ground floor was intact. The fire department let the artists remain in return for keeping the place together and ignored the fact that the residents were heating a fire trap with wood stoves. In 1979, the Reno was torched. But by then, the artists, who had seen the end coming, had stripped the structure of its old-growth redwood lumber and used it to construct new houses elsewhere.

Also among the regulars at Parnassus Avenue was an elderly retired pathologist, a charming Texan, more or less high-functioning despite his heroin habit. His filmmaker son, who’d gone to school with Henry, kept trying to make his dad quit using. It was almost a game, a drama that featured the son flushing the doctor’s stash. We took turns accompanying the doctor to restaurant meals (he preferred Vietnamese) that he paid for and we couldn’t have afforded. Our job was to get him home in a cab after he nodded off at the table.

I introduced a few of my college friends into the mix. Most had grown up in San Francisco and come home. Either they were running for local office, or working as radical lawyers, or living in Berkeley in loosely structured communes for semi-closeted gay alcoholics. Sometimes I went camping on the beach at Mendocino with the alcoholics, which was fun, except for the drunken drive home, weaving across the Golden Gate Bridge in a rusty panel truck with no seat belts.

Later, I would be reminded of the time I lived in California when I read Joan Didion’s essay about the first time she lived in New York: “It never occurred to me that I was living a real life there. In my imagination I was always there for just another few months, just until Christmas or Easter or the first warm day in May.” People live on a different calendar, she wrote, when they always have, in a drawer, a schedule of outgoing plane flights.

You form different relationships and make different decisions when you aren’t planning on staying. You don’t expect your new friendships to withstand the test of distance, and your love affairs, you tell yourself, need to last only until you have somewhere else to go.

In San Francisco, I was living on what remained of my book advance. Henry wrote science-fiction-themed pornography for a famous French publisher, famous for publishing Beckett, Burroughs, Henry Miller, and Nabokov—and for not paying his writers.

Grace worked in a dress shop in Ghirardelli Square. The store—Madame or Contessa or Principessa Something or Other—sold clingy Italian knitwear that looked dreadful on everyone regardless of age, shape, or physical beauty. Grace was smart and acerbic and pretty in the pale, Pre-Raphaelite way that redheads cultivated then. I liked going out drinking with her after she got off work. Her idea of fun was to go to the singles bars on Union Street, the Black bars on Fillmore, or the hippie bars in the Haight and get men to buy us one cocktail apiece and finish it and thank them and leave. It was all about the hasty exit, about glimpsing that momentary flare of disappointment. We never got into trouble. It was Grace’s feminist mini-payback, though she would never have called it that. She’d grown up in Oregon. She’d met Henry in Portland when he was at Reed. Even after a few drinks, she was an impeccable driver.

The first time I met Grace at the store where she worked, I was shocked by how much it looked like Ransohoff’s, the sophisticated dress salon in Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film. Scottie, a detective, has taken a woman named Judy to the shop to buy a suit. He hopes that the tailored dove-gray outfit will transform tough working girl Judy into her near double, his beloved ice queen, Madeleine Elster, who, he half believes, will return from the dead if he can only dress Judy in a replica of Madeleine’s pencil skirt and nip-waisted jacket.

On leave from the police department, Scottie has been hired by wealthy Gavin Elster, whose wife, Madeleine, has been making entranced, ritualistic pilgrimages to a mission graveyard and to a museum. Scottie trails Madeleine and watches her throw herself into the bay. He saves her, then brings her to his apartment to recover. After Madeleine dies in a shocking accident, he spots a young woman who looks just like her, except that Judy is redheaded instead of blond, working class instead of patrician. Scottie sets about transforming Judy into the dead Madeleine. All it will take is the flawless blond chignon and the magical gray suit from Ransohoff’s, which is how they wind up at the shop like the one where Grace worked.

I’ve watched the film over and over without ever tiring of it, maybe because it always seems to be about something else. Like all great art, it changes along with us, attaches itself to one reading and another as time shows us what we overlooked or what we were too young and inexperienced to understand.

When I was often angry at men, I believed that the film was about necrophilia, about Sleeping Beauty, about men preferring dead or unconscious women to living beings with minds of their own. Then I decided that the film was about obsession, about the ways in which Madeleine’s pretend fixations are mirrored by Scottie’s real one. Then I decided that the film was about social class, about men’s aspirational longing for a certain kind of chic, wealthy blonde. Then I decided that the film was about the way that some people have a type, a face or body or character trait that’s imprinted on them, an ideal they find or lose early on and continue to look for, hopelessly and forever. Then I decided that it was about the destructive effects of lying. Scottie is being lied to, and he learns how to lie to himself in ways that will prevent him from ever being happy.

In 1974, San Francisco looked to me very much like it looked to Alfred Hitchcock and his cinematographer, Robert Burks: sharp-edged, bright and ghostly, desperately romantic, filtered through a dreamlike haze. The action is accompanied by Bernard Herrmann’s lavish, ominously propulsive score, the swells of music that mimic the rush of love, the five-note theme that rises, then falls on the descending half notes that follow.

I’d been to many of the places in the film: The Mission Dolores cemetery. The Legion of Honor, where Madeleine Elster spends hours gazing at the portrait of Carlotta Valdes. The Palace of Fine Arts. They were pilgrimage spots, like Kafka’s grave, or Flaubert’s house in Rouen, where my husband lectured me about Flaubert’s perfectionism and his misogyny, and where I felt like Emma Bovary: in the wrong place, with the wrong husband, pining for the wrong men. Bored senseless.

When I remember San Francisco in 1974, the first images that come to mind are from Vertigo, and I have to remind myself that the city I lived in was not the one that Hitchcock filmed. During their first meeting, Scottie and Elster complain about how San Francisco has changed for the worse.

They should have seen it in the 1970s. People like the Elsters still swanned in and out of the mansions on Russian Hill, but if they ventured down into the flatlands, they were in for a shock. The Summer of Love was over, and no one had swept up after the party. There were no more ecstatic be-ins in Golden Gate Park, the Grateful Dead were on perpetual tour, and the Diggers—with their guerrilla theater and free food and housing for all—had moved on. Artists and writers were moving north to Marin County, and AIDS would soon scythe its way through the city, starting with the Castro.

The drug-addled hippie squalor that Didion found in the Haight and described in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”—the mindless communal stupor, the toddlers tripping on acid—seemed paradisical compared to downtown San Francisco. Nearly every corner had its resident meth heads, scratching themselves bloody. It had taken less than a decade for the city to change from Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar to Mad Max and Panic in Needle Park.

Richard Nixon was in the White House. The FBI was unstoppably determined to destroy the Black Panthers. Searching for the Zebra killer and Field Marshal Cinque, Bay Area cops routinely stopped and searched Black men at random. It was harder to feel optimistic about a better future. Nothing seemed quite as sexy, as new, as fluid as it once did.

Like the knitwear in the shop where Grace worked, the fashions of the 1970s—the wide lapels and flowing sleeves and bell-bottoms—flattered no one. Grace got me a job at the dress shop. I think she knew that it wouldn’t work out, but she had a mischievous streak. She told me to wear my simplest and most expensive dress and to put on makeup.

I lasted less than a day. Grace’s manager fired me for hiding in the changing room whenever a couple walked in. I was afraid that, like Scottie, the man would ask me to turn his female companion into the living replica of a dead woman. It was a fear I had in Cambridge, that something I saw in a movie could happen in real life.

Excerpted from 1974: A Personal History by Francine Prose. Copyright © 2024 by Francine Prose. Published by Harper. Reprinted by permission of the author and HarperCollins.

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