Therese Anne Fowler, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald
Featured Book
A fictional examination of the wild, ill-fated life of Zelda Fitzgerald
Anyone familiar with Zelda Fitzgerald — and particularly anyone who has sided with her in the unending war of public opinion over her marriage (a demanding, needy wife married to a tortured genius vs. a fragile talent with an abusive, narcissist husband) — will be captured almost immediately by Z, Therese Anne Fowler’s empathetic must-read. Taking the well-worn facts about Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald — flapper, muse, mother, possible schizophrenic — Fowler has created not only a well-rounded, flesh-and-blood evocation of a woman alternately cast in the annals of literary history as a martyr or harpy, but recreated the times in which she lived with page-turning zeal. Brash, breezy, and heartbreakingly self-aware, Z depicts a woman wrestling with her ambitions and her place as the wife of one of America’s most celebrated novelists, placed in a historical context in a way that pure biographies have been unable to render compellingly.
Fowler reminds readers of Zelda’s fate — a life ultimately spent apart from her husband, whom she loved deeply, struggling against bipolar disorder in various sanatoriums and hospitals — from the very first pages, but writes the real-life characters of this novel so compellingly that readers will find themselves hoping for a different outcome. Alas, the book ends when the Fitzgeralds’ mercurial, tempestuous marriage does. But like its heroine, the soaring high spirits of Z more than compensate for its tragic climax.
