Call Me Zelda

March 25, 2013
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.

March 15, 2013
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.

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