A broken woman in a glamorous time
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? With brilliant insight
and imagination, Therese Anne Fowler brings us Zelda’s
irresistible story as she herself might have told it.
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