‘‘Z: The Beginning of Everything’’ based on ‘Z: A Novel of Zelda‘ Who's watching?

‘I wish I could tell everyone who thinks we're ruined, Look closer…and you'll see something extraordinary, mystifying, something real and true.We have never been what we seemed. ”

I took a photograph recently—and shared it on my instagram—of the apartment building where F. Scott Fitzgerald died here in Los Angeles. At forty four, his fame and fortune diminished, he had a heart attack in the apartment of his mistress, Hollywood gossip columnist Sheila Graham, while his wife Zelda was confined to a psychiatric hospital. Karma? That story, the story of Zelda’s wildness and her ultimate descent into insanity, is one we’ve heard before. Z: The Beginning of Everything, now streaming on Amazon for Amazon prime members is Zelda's story, as Zelda might have told it. 

Christina Ricci plays Fitzgerald’s legendary lady love with David Hoflin (American Crime) as F. Scott. The series—which I won’t be watching because I don’t have Amazon Prime and I resent paying $3 a pop for each episode of a tv series— is based on Therese Anne Fowler’s Z: A Novel of Zelda. Yet another book I haven’t read! Can you believe it?

About the book

When beautiful, reckless Southern belle Zelda Sayre meets F. Scott Fitzgerald at a country club dance in 1918, she is seventeen years old and he is a young army lieutenant stationed in Alabama. Before long, the "ungettable" Zelda has fallen for him despite his unsuitability: Scott isn't wealthy or prominent or even a Southerner, and keeps insisting, absurdly, that his writing will bring him both fortune and fame. Her father is deeply unimpressed. But after Scott sells his first novel, This Side of Paradise, to Scribner's, Zelda optimistically boards a train north, to marry him in the vestry of St. Patrick's Cathedral and take the rest as it comes.

What comes, here at the dawn of the Jazz Age, is unimagined attention and success and celebrity that will make Scott and Zelda legends in their own time. Everyone wants to meet the dashing young author of the scandalous novel—and his witty, perhaps even more scandalous wife. Zelda bobs her hair, adopts daring new fashions, and revels in this wild new world. Each place they go becomes a playground: New York City, Long Island, Hollywood, Paris, and the French Riviera—where they join the endless party of the glamorous, sometimes doomed Lost Generation that includes Ernest Hemingway, Sara and Gerald Murphy, and Gertrude Stein. 

Everything seems new and possible. Troubles, at first, seem to fade like morning mist. But not even Jay Gatsby's parties go on forever. Who is Zelda, other than the wife of a famous—sometimes infamous—husband? How can she forge her own identity while fighting her demons and Scott's, too? With brilliant insight and imagination, Therese Anne Fowler brings us Zelda's irresistible story as she herself might have told it.

Have you read the book Z: A Novel of Zelda?

Have you seen the series Z: The Beginning of Everything?

Did you like, love, hate? I’d like to know.