Call Me Zelda: A Novel

by Erika Robuck Narrated by Amy Landon

Overview

From New York to Paris, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald reigned as king and queen of the Jazz Age, seeming to float on champagne bubbles above the mundane cares of the world. But to those who truly knew them, the endless parties were only a distraction from their inner turmoil and from a love that united them with a scorching intensity.



When Zelda is committed to a Baltimore psychiatric clinic in 1932, vacillating between lucidity and madness in her struggle to forge an identity separate from her husband, the famous writer, she finds a sympathetic friend in her nurse, Anna Howard. Held captive by her own tragic past, Anna is increasingly drawn into the Fitzgeralds' tumultuous relationship. As she becomes privy to Zelda's most intimate confessions, written in a secret memoir meant only for her, Anna begins to wonder which Fitzgerald is the true genius. But in taking ever greater emotional risks to save Zelda, Anna may end up paying a far higher price than she intended.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Robuck, who first explored the lives and loves of authors in Hemingway’s Girl, now turns to the tumultuous, codependent relationship of Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. It’s 1932, and Anna Howard, a nurse who lost her husband and daughter in the Great War, is assigned to work with Zelda when she’s committed to Baltimore’s Phipps Psychiatric Clinic. Soon she’s drawn into Zelda’s charismatic but deeply unstable orbit, going so far as to quit her job to become Zelda’s private nurse when she leaves Phipps. Anna’s relationship with the Fitzgeralds is fraught and all-consuming, causing her to turn away from her own family and friends even as it seems to help her find a way back to herself. Robuck effectively captures the Fitzgeralds’ turbulent marriage, as well as their inability to function—personally or professionally—beyond their jazz age heyday and into the Depression era. What is less convincing is Anna’s motivations for being so immediately and utterly drawn to the couple. Neither this nor Anna’s eventual recovery—in which her relationship to the Fitzgeralds helps her return to healthy life—are as well articulated as is the portrayal of the Fitzgeralds’ rocky romance. Agent: Kevan Lyon, the Marsal Lyon Literary Agency. (May)

From the Publisher - AUDIO COMMENTARY

"[A] haunting and beautifully atmospheric novel . . . brilliantly brings Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald to life in all their doomed beauty, with compelling and unforgettable results." —Alex George, author of A Good American

From the Publisher

"[A] haunting and beautifully atmospheric novel . . . brilliantly brings Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald to life in all their doomed beauty, with compelling and unforgettable results." —Alex George, author of A Good American

Library Journal

Robuck (Hemingway’s Girl) has again written a novel about a Roaring Twenties literary figure. This time she focuses on Zelda Fitzgerald, author, painter, dancer, and famous wife of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. Robuck creates a fictional character named Anna Howard, who acts as Zelda’s nurse, first in a mental hospital and then in the Fitzgeralds’ home. By crafting a narrator external to the Fitzgeralds’ social circle, Robuck is able to write about Zelda from an outsider’s perspective. Anna examines her own life’s tragedies through the lens of Zelda’s memories, marital failure, and mental collapse. Anna becomes Zelda’s confidante, providing opportunities for intimate conversation, honest criticism, and enduring promises.

Verdict Though less biographical than other recent fictional works about Zelda (such as Theresa Fowler’s Z or R. Clifton Spargo’s Beautiful Fools), this historical novel will appeal to readers interested in the famous Jazz Age couple. As an intimate portrait of a mentally ill artist and wife, Robuck’s latest work will be an easy read for fans of historical fiction or women’s interests. [See also the Tantorious audio podcast with Robuck, ow.ly/kCBs4.—Ed.]—Shannon Marie Robinson, Denison Univ. Lib., Granville, OH
(c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Kirkus Reviews

Yet another addition to what is becoming a gracious plenty of novels and biographies focusing on the Scott-Zelda relationship. Robuck's strategy is to create a first-person narrator, Anna Howard, who is Zelda's nurse at Phipps Psychiatric Clinic in Baltimore when Zelda is hospitalized for schizophrenia in February of 1932. Although Zelda is reluctant to open up to her doctors, she becomes more comfortable confiding in Anna some of the complex inner workings of her relationship with Scott. At first, Anna is an occasionally reluctant repository of Zelda's outpourings, for she's suffering from the loss of her husband during the Great War and the death of a beloved daughter from pneumonia, but soon, everyone at the clinic is relying on Anna for advice about the best treatment for Zelda. Anna encourages Zelda to write (she's working on Save Me the Waltz) and to extend herself by writing memoirs recounting her turbulent and toxic relationship. We meet Scott as well, of course, and find he can be charming and seductive as well as boozy and vindictive. (If he's not the greatest narcissist in American literature, he certainly comes close.) He inflicts great pain on Zelda by belittling her talents as a writer while at the same time cribbing some of her diary entries wholesale for Tender Is the Night. Eventually, Anna quits the clinic and becomes Zelda's private nurse when the Fitzgeralds take a house north of Baltimore. Anna and Zelda's relationship deepens to friendship and occasionally evinces a quasi-erotic quality on the part of Anna even as she develops a love relationship with Will, the best friend of her late husband. Although Robuck occasionally succumbs to a cloying sentimentality, she usually succeeds in skirting the soap-opera aspects of her subject matter.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171125561
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	05/07/2013
Edition description:	Unabridged

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