The first secret Frances Brogan ever kept was that she could read. Her mother, Meagan, was reading aloud when three-year-old Frances interrupted and asked to read the next part. “I asked her, have you been reading for a long time?” Meagan recalled. “And she said yes, but she hadn’t told me because she was afraid I’d stop reading to her if I knew she could read by herself.”
Meagan’s proud stories of her daughter’s youth reveal an early fascination with social experiences and human connection. She laughed as she described how Frances began speaking before her peers. “She was this little tiny baby talking to people. She made the other babies cry, because she’d be like, ‘Hi! What’s your name?’ She was very intense.” At a year and a half, Frances realized that the other children on the playground wouldn’t respond to her insistent introductions, so she began approaching their parents instead. As a toddler, she asked her mother to draw family trees and friend trees, tracing out the invisible lines connecting the people around her.
Today, Frances is in her final year at Princeton, her sights set on journalism once she graduates. She is managing editor of the Daily Princetonian; she reads New Yorker articles on the incline treadmill at the gym; she spent the past summer reporting on the ground in Palestine and Israel, despite her friends’ concerns for her safety. And in a rigorous environment where the academic and the social are often seen as separate or even at odds, Frances has cultivated an intellectual life that is fundamentally social.
Frances’ friend Sofia, also a Princeton senior, said that their bond first solidified freshman year, during a coffee meetup that turned into an hours-long conversation. Anna Karenina, Sofia noted, was one of many topics they discussed. “Frances has a tendency of making friendships that way. She’s a good conversationalist. She has a way of asking questions and making you think deeply about things.”
Anna Karenina is one of Frances’ favorite books, an example of the sweeping epics that she gravitates toward, though she reads voraciously through everything she finds interesting. “She loves a meaty engagement,” Meagan said, “and then she loves to have someone to talk about it with. She’s a very intense conversationalist.” Frances, her mother said, is drawn to the emotional and social aspects of learning as much as the learning itself — like she did as a toddler, when she hid her ability to read for fear of losing out on the shared experience.
From a young age, Frances took firm positions on causes from geopolitics to environmentalism to feminism. Her father was a professor and a Catholic, and they often found themselves on opposing sides of issues, engaging in heated debate over religion and morality. He passed away when Frances was 13. “It’s tragic that she lost her dad,” Meagan said, “but part of the tragedy is that they can’t continue that conversation. She has to do it in her head.”
Whether in her head or with the people around her, Frances is continuing these conversations. “I care and think a lot about how to live an ethical life,” she said. “I can be an asshole, and I gossip, and I’ll be mean to my siblings — so I try to morally commit where I can.”
Frances sees her mother as a defining role model — for her strength and resilience but also for her authenticity. Though Frances views herself as having “a pathologic need to be liked,” she admires how her mother never seems to code-switch or act like anyone other than her true self. Meagan recalled feeling similar when she was Frances’ age, struggling to know if she was being herself. But she has a different perspective on her daughter. “I don’t think she’s very good at contorting herself. I don’t think that’s a skill she’s ever developed, and I don’t think she ever will. She may not know it, but she is very authentic. I think that’s her lot in life — to be herself.”
