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A tale inspired by the marriage of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald follows their union in defiance of her father's opposition and her abandonment of the provincial finery of her upbringing in favor of a scandalous flapper identity that gains her entry into the literary party scenes of New York, Paris and the French Riviera.… (more)
3 stars because although I thought that Zelda was interesting, sad and well told, but I question the accuracy of her Zelda even though I liked her. Fowler indeed did much research, but then essentially changed & slanted it by making up the dialog to support her thoughts. What talented, but yet wasted lives they led. ( )
An enjoyable read, especially the audio version. I know this is highly fictionalized and speculative but I still enjoyed this story of the Fitzgeralds's crazy lives. This story of the Jazz Age was a lot of fun to listen to and made me want to read more about them ( )
This book was like a roller coaster. It was a slow climb out of the gate but once it went over that first hill when Zelda married Scott, it was a wild ride to the very end. My god what a pleasure to read! ( )
Happily, happily foreverafterward - the best we could. - Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald
If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?
—T.S. Eliot
Dedication
Once again
To
Zelda
First words
Prologue: Dear Scott, The Love of the Last Tycoon is a great title for your novel.
Chapter I: Picture a late June morning in 1918, a time when Montgomery wore her prettiest spring dress and finest floral perfume - same as I would wear that evening.
Quotations
Though I suspect he has someone out there, he writes to me all the time, and always ends his letters, With dearest love... My letters to him are signed, Devotedly... Even now, when we haven’t shared an address in six years, when he’s probably shining his light on some adoring girl who surely thinks she has saved him, we’re both telling it true. This is what we’ve got at the moment, who we are. It’s not nearly what we once had--the good. I mean--but it’s also not what we once had, meaning the bad.
I rested my head against his shoulder and we watched the sun set, just like you might see in the movies. We’d worked hard to create this lovely, new domestic bliss, and before Gatsby’s publication, right up until the book was printed and put into the hands of both the reading and the reviewing public, it looked as if we might actually succeed. Wait: if I leave it at that, it’ll sound like the novel’s disappointing performance is to blame for the disaster we made of our lives, and that’s not really so. Ernest Hemingway is to blame.
Trouble has lots of forms. There’s financial trouble and marital trouble, there’s trouble with friends and trouble with landlords and trouble with liquor and trouble with the law. Every sort of trouble I can think of, we’ve tried it out--become expert at some of it, even, so much so that I’ve come to wonder whether artists in particular seek out hard times the way flowers turn their faces toward the sun.
Scott and I had a row last weekend and haven’t spoken since--but as we are going to Sylvia Beach’s dinner for James Joyce tonight, I’ll once again have to put on my Mrs. F. Scott costume and try to play nice with him and the other children. Whose life is this, anyway? Only when I’m sweating rivers perfecting my plies in the studio do I feel like a whole and real person.
Scott spent the next several days drafting a story he called ‘The Rich Boy,’ then set it aside and returned to his routine of having cocktails with those very same types.
Last words
There's no need for me to be present; I'm not saying goodbye.
A tale inspired by the marriage of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald follows their union in defiance of her father's opposition and her abandonment of the provincial finery of her upbringing in favor of a scandalous flapper identity that gains her entry into the literary party scenes of New York, Paris and the French Riviera.
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Book description
Picture a late-May morning in 1918, a time when Montgomery wore her prettiest spring dress and finest floral perfume—same as I would wear that evening…
Thus begins the story of beautiful, reckless, seventeen-year-old Zelda Sayre on the day she meets Lieutenant Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald at a country club dance. Fitzgerald isn’t rich or settled; no one knows his people; and he wants, of all things, to be a writer in New York. No matter how wildly in love they may be, Zelda’s father firmly opposes the match. But when Scott finally sells his first novel, This Side of Paradise, Zelda defies her parents to board a train to New York and marry him in the vestry of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Life is a sudden whirl of glamour and excitement: Everyone wants to meet the dashing young author of the scandalous novel—and his beautiful, perhaps even more scandalous wife. Zelda bobs her hair, trades in her provincial finery for daring dresses, and plunges into the endless party that welcomes the darlings of the literary world to New York, then Paris and the French Riviera.
It is the Jazz Age, when everything seems new and possible—except that dazzling success does not always last. Surrounded by a thrilling array of magnificent hosts and mercurial geniuses—including Sara and Gerald Murphy, Gertrude Stein, and the great and terrible Ernest Hemingway—Zelda and Scott find the future both grander and stranger than they could have ever imagined.