Carlene Bauer

Carlene Bauer, an American writer and essayist, explores faith, artistic ambition, friendship, and the tension between private conviction and public life. Frances and Bernard is an epistolary novel inspired in part by the correspondence of writers Flannery O’Connor and Robert Lowell. Its fictional poets meet at an artists’ colony in 1957, then sustain an intense relationship through letters that move between literary discussion, spiritual argument, affection, and disappointment. The book appeared from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2013. Bauer chose the letter form to let two strong voices reveal themselves directly, allowing intimacy and disagreement to develop through what each character writes and leaves unanswered. Her earlier memoir, Not That Kind of Girl, considered religious belief and life in New York, while her later novel Girls They Write Songs About returned to complicated creative friendships. Frances and Bernard brings these recurring interests together in a story where writing is both vocation and relationship, and where admiration cannot erase profound differences in temperament, faith, or need.