Call Me Zelda

I bought this book because I was interested in the story of the Fitzgeralds, particularly Zelda. I ended up feeling I'd been sold a bill of goods. Call Me Zelda is primarily the story of the entirely fictional Anna Howard, Zelda's personal psychiatric nurse-cum-friend. Anna has an complex history and she's not an uninteresting character, but she is most definitely the protagonist of a book that purported to tell the story of Zelda Fitzgerald's last, and saddest, decade, as she spun further from reality in one institution after the other. Or so I thought.

I expected something along the lines of The Paris Wife or even The Aviator's Wife. Instead, I found myself tucked into a work of (almost pure) fiction. Happily, the setting for most of the book is Baltimore, and neighborhoods I know - or at least remember - well, appear throughout, from Mount Vernon, to the streets around the Johns Hopkins hospital, to the still very rural Towson. Erika Robuck also did a nice job depicting the relationship between Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (although I cannot say how accurate Robuck's description is - maybe entirely, or maybe colored largely by what she hoped it might have been). In any case, it is fascinating to read about and the way they simultaneously needed and destroyed one another.

Aside from the fact that the book wasn't what I expected, my fault and mine alone, I had one other real quibble. Call Me Zelda is divided into acts; I really enjoyed the first, and longest, and couldn't help but wish that Robuck had ended the story there; not only was the second act often cloying, but the conclusion of the first act really felt like the natural end of both Anna's story and Zelda's.

Overall, Call Me Zelda is a mixed bag. The story feels somewhat contrived, and is (most likely) not nearly as close to the real story as I would have liked, but as a work of fiction, the plot and characters are interesting, particularly in Act One.