I wish I could tell everyone who thinks were ruined Look closerxand youll see something extraordinary mystifying something real and true We have never been what we seemedWhen beautiful reckless Southern belle Zelda Sayre meets F Scott Fitzgerald at a country club dance in she is seventeen years old and he is a young army lieutenant stationed in Alabama Before long the xungettablex Zelda has fallen for him despite his unsuitability Scott isnt 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 Scribners Zelda optimistically boards a train north to marry him in the vestry of St Patricks Cathedral and take the rest as it comesWhat 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 SteinEverything seems new and possible Troubles at first seem to fade like morning mist But not even Jay Gatsbys 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 Scotts too With brilliant insight and imagination Therese Anne Fowler brings us Zeldas irresistible story as she herself might have told it.
