Another Side of Paradise

The writing is beautiful. Sally Koslow's writing is what hooked me and why I finished, despite so thoroughly disliking both Sheilah Graham and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the main characters in Another Side of Paradise.

Told from Sheilah's perspective, this novel is the story of their nearly-four year romance while Zelda was institutionalized and Scott toiled in Hollywood, earning just enough to stave off his creditors. (The Hollywood period in all its agony and glory is the focus of West of Sunset, which I preferred to Another Side of Paradise because of the former's broader focus.) To say the relationship between Sheilah and Scott was volatile would be an understatement. And so, not surprisingly, their actions are repetitive: they're together happily, Scott goes on a bender, there's an ugly fight and break-up, he begs her forgiveness, she goes back to him. The cycle is broken only by Scott's death. Ugh.

The best of Another Side of Paradise are the other chapters covering Sheilah's life before Hollywood. Born Lily Shiel in an East End slum, her father dies and mothers sends her to an institution for Jewish children. As a teenager, she meets a kindly businessman who helps her create the fiction of Sheilah Graham and sets her on a course to hobnob with the likes of the Mitfords and Randolph Churchill.

In Koslow's telling, Sheilah struggles with the lies she has told and lives in constant fear of being unmasked as a fake and am imposter. This may or may not be true. Presumably she did love Scott Fitzgerald, though God knows it's impossible to understand why. I can but give her the benefit of the doubt and assume it had to do with his writing.

When it comes to a final reckoning, unfortunately, I found both Sheilah and Scott so dislikable, but they detracted from the overall experience, and so, where I would otherwise have said this was a solid 4-star read, I'm concluding with 3 stars and feeling generous. Skip the historical fiction and go for the real stuff: The Cruise of the Rolling Junk should sate any reader looking for a taste of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Three stars.