It’s one thing for your husband to leave you for another woman, but how is a person supposed to feel when the man of her dreams abandons her for the stars themselves? In the twelve tales of Women and Children First, Francine Prose shows us an alcoholic trying to improve himself by fasting, a housewife enrolled in the New Consciousness Academy, and a French literature professor who’s begun to fear Madame Bovary. Prose’s characters are lost, frightened, and alone—and far more like us than we might care to admit.