Francisco by Alison Mills Newman Mills Newman originally published Francisco, based on her life and love affair with her eventual husband, the director Francisco Newman, in 1974; the publisher New Directions rereleased it earlier this year. It’s told by a young Black actor in California, and the eponymous character is her lover, who is obsessively working on a documentary. The narrator is dissatisfied with Hollywood and her career, but she’s hungry for everything else life offers. She is a wise and insightful reader of people, and she and Francisco hang out with a lot of them, up and down the coast of California. Mills Newman’s novel feels like a long party, punctuated by difficult questions: about white standards of beauty, what it really means to be a revolutionary, how to be an artist, and how to be a woman partnered with a man. In the decades since it was published, Mills Newman has become a devout Christian and come to reject elements of the novel. These include, as she mentions in a new afterword, the …