Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald
Books | Fiction / Historical / General
4.1
(63)
Therese Fowler
THE INSPIRATION FOR THE TELEVISION DRAMA Z: THE BEGINNING OF EVERYTHING With brilliant insight and imagination, Therese Anne Fowler's New York Times bestseller Z brings us Zelda's irresistible story as she herself might have told it. I wish I could tell everyone who thinks we're ruined, Look closer...and you'll see something extraordinary, mystifying, something real and true. We have never been what we seemed. When beautiful, reckless Southern belle Zelda Sayre meets F. Scott Fitzgerald at a country club dance in 1918, she is seventeen years old and he is a young army lieutenant stationed in Alabama. Before long, the "ungettable" Zelda has fallen for him despite his unsuitability: Scott isn't wealthy or prominent or even a Southerner, and keeps insisting, absurdly, that his writing will bring him both fortune and fame. Her father is deeply unimpressed. But after Scott sells his first novel, This Side of Paradise, to Scribner's, Zelda optimistically boards a train north, to marry him in the vestry of St. Patrick's Cathedral and take the rest as it comes. What comes, here at the dawn of the Jazz Age, is unimagined attention and success and celebrity that will make Scott and Zelda legends in their own time. Everyone wants to meet the dashing young author of the scandalous novel—and his witty, perhaps even more scandalous wife. Zelda bobs her hair, adopts daring new fashions, and revels in this wild new world. Each place they go becomes a playground: New York City, Long Island, Hollywood, Paris, and the French Riviera—where they join the endless party of the glamorous, sometimes doomed Lost Generation that includes Ernest Hemingway, Sara and Gerald Murphy, and Gertrude Stein. Everything seems new and possible. Troubles, at first, seem to fade like morning mist. But not even Jay Gatsby's parties go on forever. Who is Zelda, other than the wife of a famous—sometimes infamous—husband? How can she forge her own identity while fighting her demons and Scott's, too?
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Author
Therese Fowler
Pages
375
Publisher
Macmillan
Published Date
2013-03-26
ISBN
1250028655 9781250028655
Community ReviewsSee all
"Z begins with a spark — a dazzling portrait of Zelda Sayre, a young Southern belle brimming with wit, beauty, and promise. The beginning and end are truly entrancing, pulling you into her world with elegance and urgency. That said, the middle stretches thin during Scott’s pre-Gatsby days, where the pacing lags and the emotional tension dulls slightly. But the story more than redeems itself.<br/><br/>What lingers is the gut-punch realization of how much (and how little) has changed in the past hundred years. Yes, we can vote, drink, and work now, but the expectation that a woman should offer every waking moment of herself in service to a man’s ego? That hasn’t budged much.<br/><br/>Zelda feels like the original Ballerina Farms—polished, playful, and full of promise— until she meets a man who sees her not as a partner, but as a prize. And then he does exactly what he set out to do: own her. The emotional erosion that follows is heartbreaking and haunting.<br/><br/>I had read The Paris Wife and thought I’d seen Hemingway’s worst through Hadley’s eyes — but Fowler’s Zelda adds another damning layer. There really is no depth to which powerful men won’t sink when their own self-image is on the line.<br/><br/>This novel is a reclamation. A warning. A tragedy. And somehow, it still manages to feel beautiful."
Kasey Driskell
