In the book’s best moments, most of which are clustered early on in the story, its frantic pace puts readers in Zelda’s place - swept off our carefree, teenaged feet by a dashing young officer who promises to show us the world. Trying to condense the entirety of that experience into less than 400 pages is a near impossibility. The Fitzgeralds’ lives were filled to the brim with parties, friends, grand artistic ambitions and larger-than-life feelings. To remedy this, Fowler sets out on an ambitious mission: To tell Zelda’s side of the story throughout the entire Fitzgerald marriage - all 20-odd rushing, confusing, desperate years of it.īut that very ambition ultimately defeats this attempt to make us understand the complicated woman Zelda Fitzgerald was, and the even more complicated relationship she had with her husband. An accomplished dancer, a promising painter and a daring writer - none of which was enough to step out of Scott’s shadow. Fowler doesn’t settle that question conclusively (and perhaps it’s impossible to do so), but she does make the point that Zelda was a talented, ambitious artist in her own right. Depending on who tells the tale, she held Scott back from greater success during his lifetime or steered him to the ones he did achieve. Scott Fitzgerald was not an easy man to live with - he often drowned his creative doubts in champagne and vodka and ultimately doubted whether he’d succeeded in carving out for himself the place in American letters he’d set out to claim. Scott Fitzgerald himself) and the group of artists, writers and intellectuals that gathered around Scott and Zelda in absinthe-drenched Paris salons.

The lives of both Fitzgeralds have been shrouded in the nostalgic mist now associated with the Jazz Age (a phrase coined, as Fowler points out, by F. In this quote from Zelda Fitzgerald’s novel, Save Me the Waltz, lies Zelda herself as presented in Therese Anne Fowler’s Z - a woman increasingly tormented by her seeming inability to achieve her artistic goals independently of her famous husband, F. “It seemed to Alabama that, reaching her goal, she would drive the devils that had driven her - that, in proving herself, she would achieve that peace which she imagined went only in surety of one’s self.”

Therese Anne Fowler will be appearing at the Gaithersburg Book Festival, May 18, 2013.

A novel of zelda fitzgerald