Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

by Therese Anne Fowler

feel like you and me … we’re this new creature just hatched into the world and there’s nobody like us and we have to figure out every little thing fresh.

“Give me a hero, and I will tell you a tragedy.

‘Show me a hero, and I’ll write you a tragedy.

To be a writer then was to be a drab little mole who thought big thoughts and methodically committed them to paper, hoping for publication but not courting it, and then burrowing back into the hole to think again for a while.

Why do you suppose humans persist in living where it’s so cold that we’d want to cover ourselves up with another animal’s skin and hair? It’s sort of queer, isn’t it?

Every sort of trouble I can think of, we’ve tried it out—become expert at some of it, even, so much so that I’ve come to wonder whether artists in particular seek out hard times the way flowers turn their faces toward the sun.

Even so, I would stubbornly continue to assert my preference for weeks, the way you do when you allow hope to prevail over knowledge,

kept the news to myself and chased my thoughts around and around inside my head, unable to be happy about my condition and miserable about that unhappiness.

Like having fifteen little bites of chocolate cream pie even though you could’ve finished off that slice in five.

There would be too much everything and not enough anything, and then where would that leave us?

believed, as I did, that we are helpless to resist or influence what our hearts are bound to do.

She said it like that, with quotation marks in her voice; no one asked her what she meant.

To a person who has hardly been sick in her life, sudden illness feels like a betrayal. The doctor hadn’t

A roomful of dancing, sweating, laughing people is a beautiful thing.

My silence was a protection from distraction, that’s how I thought of it.

No greatness is possible without failure and sacrifice.

There’s nothing like losing yourself in someone else’s troubles to make you forget your own.

He nodded, and when morning came he was in good spirits again. He told Scottie, “Look at this—I went out for cigarettes last night and had a run-in with an orangutan.” “Daddy,” she scolded him. “Orangutans live in Asia.” “They do, but they have very long arms.”

“It’s in Scribner’s,” Scott said, with the air of superiority he often assumed when he was about one drink past jolly but still several away from fully obnoxious.

waited for him to say more. And waited. And waited. Then I got tired of waiting, and my thoughts started to drift like thoughts do when you’re not quite asleep in your bed in the dark middle of the night.

That was the thing with Scott: if he loved you truly, he had trouble seeing your flaws. What a gift, I thought. What a curse.

You know Sara, nothing halfway. Whereas I did everything in my life halfway, or worse.

couldn’t ignore the little voice in my head that said maybe I was supposed to shed halfway and do something significant. Contribute something. Accomplish something. Choose. Be.

Which of my many possible lives did I want to define me? Which one could I have?

freely. I hate avarice, but I hate caution even more.”