Call me Zelda by Erika Robuck- 2011 - 339 pages

Call me Zelda by Erika Robuck- 2011 - 339 pages

This is sixth work of historical fiction by Erika Robuck I have so far read. She has published seven novels.

My first five  were 

The Invisible Woman - 2021 - set largely in occupied France during World War Two

Sisters of Night and Fog -2022.  Set also largely in France during WW Two

Fallen Beauty - 2014. Set in upstate New York in the 1920s and 1930s - focusing in part on the poet Edna Saint Vincent Millay

Receive Me Falling. - 2009- Set mostly on the Sugar Cane Plantations on the Caribbean Island of Natal.  Shifting from the 1830s to the 1990s.

Hemingway’s Girl - 2012. - focusing mostly on his Key West Years 

Zelda Fitzgerald 

Born: July 24, 1900, Montgomery, Alabama

Died: March 10, 1948 - Asheville, North Carolina

Spouse: F. Scott Fitzgerald (m. 1920–1940)

The Great Gatsby - 1925

Call me Zelda is narrated by Anna, who first meets Zelda Fitzgerald while working as a nurse in a psychiatric hospital.  Anna is in her late twenties,made a widow by World War One. She lost her daughter when she was five, her only child, to pneumonia.  The focus of the book is on her very long involvement with Zelda and her husband as well as developments in Anna’s own life.

There is a lot of space devoted to Zelda’s time in psychiatry hospitals, her diaries and her paintings.  We get a good luck at progressive mental healthcare in the 1920s and early 1930s.  Zelda’s husband comes across as a serious alcoholic whose behavior toward Zelda fluctuates from loving to abusive.

There are long extracts from fictional diaries of Zelda.  We follow Anna through her own romances and eventual happy marriage.

“Erika Robuck is the national bestselling author of The Invisible Woman, Hemingway’s Girl, Call Me Zelda, Fallen Beauty, The House of Hawthorne, and Receive Me Falling. She is a contributor to the anthology Grand Central: Postwar Stories of Love and Reunion, and to the Writer’s Digest Essay Collection, Author in Progress 

In 2014, Robuck was named Annapolis’ Author of the Year, and she resides there with her husband, three sons, and a spunky miniature schnauzer.” From Erikarobuck.com

I hope to read her The House of Hawthorne soon

Mel Ulm