An Unsuitable Princess

A True Fantasy | A Fantastical Memoir

By Jane Rosenberg LaForge

Fine Art by Mary Ann Strandell

An Unsuitable Princess was published in 2014 by Jaded Ibis Press. Two editions were originally available: a black-and-white edition and a collector’s edition with full-color illustrations by the artist Mary Ann Strandel. The Kindle and paperback editions are available on Amazon.

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'A tender and heartbreakingly candid reinvention of memory'

“Jane Rosenberg LaForge’s An Unsuitable Princess is a daring combination of old-school storytelling and the true wit of the best of contemporary memoirists. The first of these is a fairy tale about a young woman who cannot speak, while the second tells of the author’s awkward coming of age within the shadows of a disintegrating Hollywood neighborhood. But it is when these two narratives prove themselves inescapably linked that the novel takes its most affecting turn. ‘Tell me the story of your life,’’ the author’s daughter asks, and so the author does, with both hilarious and heartbreaking repercussions. ‘Finally,’ the author writes, ‘I am famous.’” Michelle Hoover, author of The Quickening

“It’s two, two, two tales in one. On your left, a deftly told Early Modern horsey fantasy; on your right, an aching memoir of the authorial teenage Ren Faire trauma that begat the tale. Jane Rosenberg LaForge has crafted a quirky and compelling new class of literary mashup.” Jess Winfield, co-founder of the Reduced Shakespeare Company and author of My Name is Will: A Novel of Sex, Drugs, and Shakespeare

“Jane Rosenberg LaForge lays out her dreams and desires in this tender and heartbreakingly candid reinvention of memory. An Unsuitable Princess is an entirely original look at life, personal history, and one’s original hopes.” Kate Southwood, author of Falling to Earth

More About the Book

An Unsuitable Princess: A True Fantasy | A Fantastical Memoir tells two stories simultaneously. The first, which takes place in Renaissance England, tells a mute stable girl of mysterious talents and potentially dangerous parentage finds herself punished for saving the life of the boy she loves. The second story, told through a series of footnotes, is situated in the late 20th Century and explains the inspirations for the first. An overly talkative, solidly spoiled, middle class girl muses on the social and economic phenomena the author observed while growing up in Hollywood during the birth of the hippie movement, the sexual revolution, women’s liberation, and the growth of Renaissance England re-enactments. She does not save the boy she thinks she loves. Indeed, she may have hastened his death. Years later, the only way she can acknowledge this failure is by spinning an elaborate fantasy that becomes the tale of a wretched orphan who turns out to be a princess. An Unsuitable Princess is both a coming-of-age memoir and a meditation on how people construct their daydreams when their realities inevitably disappoint.

More About the Author

Jane Rosenberg LaForge was born in Los Angeles and raised in the suburb of Laurel Canyon, where she attempted to rub shoulders with the hip and famous. Though she was not successful in that endeavor, she rode horses, took ballet lessons, participated in the Renaissance Pleasure Faire, and graduated from Hollywood High School. After finishing her bachelor’s at UCLA, she worked as a journalist in California, Maryland, and upstate New York. She studied writing in the Kate Braverman workshops of the early 1990s in Los Angeles before attending the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. At UMass, she was a Delaney Fellow and a researcher for two of Jay Neugeboren’s books on the public health system, Transforming Madness and Open Heart. Since earning her MFA, she has taught college reading, composition, and literature part-time in the New York metropolitan area; published critical articles on African-American literature; and four volumes of poetry: After Voices (Burning River 2009); Half-Life (Big Table Publishing Co. 2010); With Apologies to Mick Jagger, Other Gods, and All Women (The Aldrich Press 2012); and The Navigation of Loss (Red Ochre Press 2012), one of three winners of the Red Ochre Press’ annual chapbook competition. She has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize (once for poetry, and once for fiction) and once for a StorySouth Million Writers Award. She lives in Manhattan with her husband, Patrick, and their daughter, Eva.