Z - Therese Anne Fowler
In honor of semi-finishing the review of literature for my senior thesis, I wanted to partake in the month of Bookvember (which is to my knowledge my own creation). In this reading-driven month, I have challenged myself to read four books: Z, The Princess Bride, Paper Towns, and The Silkworm. Of these, I have finished the first in the allotted week to which I gave myself to read it.
This novel is a wonderful adaptation of the life of Ms. Zelda Sayre who becomes very early on in the novel Mrs. Zelda Fitzgerald. At the beginning of the novel, Fowler presents us with the wonderful romance that is at the beginning of most people's marriages. Fowler then shows us that this marriage was not what the media of the time presented it as. We are presented with a marriage that, like all marriages, has it's struggles. We find that their specific marriage has struggles with alcohol and health and the struggles of a writer's unpredictable salary that isn't much when placed in the thirst to have the best and newest of everything that comes with the 1920's.
In school, I learned that writers like Fitzgerald and Hemingway fled to France to escape the "corruption of the 20's." Meanwhile this novel show me a different story: that Fitzgerald -at least- fled to France because he wasn't frugal and wasn't able to stretch his money in America like he would be able to do in France. Fowler presented a story that I wasn't able to keep my hands off of (which resulted in a hot sauce stain at the bottom of one of the pages). However, this wasn't the same kind of "couldn't put it down" that stories like Divergent and The Hunger Games gives you. This was nothing more than a "oh my goodness, I have to figure out what happens next to Zelda" and "will she actually leave Scott to go to Naples" and "when is the next health issue going to happen" that kept me going.
Fowler showed me that not everyone has giant climax moments in their lives, and that -if anything- Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were just normal people with normal struggles. "Even now," Fowler wrote through the narration of Zelda at the end of the novel, "I wouldn't choose differently than I did." Even after all of her troubles with Scott, she would have married him all over again. Even with all of the pain that they caused to each other, she would do it all over again. That is the most powerful lesson this novel teaches me: that life sometimes hands you a lot of bad situations, but without enduring those bad situations, you wouldn't be who you are today.
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