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A Novel
by Nancy Horan
Book Reviewed by:Horan takes on an ambitious subject
for her first novel and carries it off with aplomb.
Frank Lloyd Wright, possibly America's best known
architect, responsible for invigorating and shaping
the field of design for over half a century, lived a
long and controversial life, dying in 1959 at the
age of 91 having married three times and fathered
seven children, adopting an eighth.
Horan focuses on
a tiny chunk of his life, his years with Mamah
Borthwick Cheney (pronounced may-muh). Mamah has
gone done in history as the woman who destroyed
Wright's first marriage but, in Horan's hands, she
is shown to be quite different to the
one-dimensional 'vampire' portrayed in the newspaper
headlines of the day. Extrapolating from the
relatively few facts known about Mamah, Horan
portrays her as a loving mother who found herself
inextricably torn between her family and her love
for the highly volatile, deeply self-centered
Wright. An immensely intelligent, vibrant woman,
Mamah was fluent in multiple languages; an
early-feminist responsible for translating some of
the works of the well-known Swedish feminist Ellen
Key; and a key influence on Wright's life and work.
Despite having "bodice-ripping" potential, Loving
Frank is most firmly a novel grounded in
research, not a 'romance'. Of course, the love
affair between Mamah and Frank is central to the
story, but Loving Frank is first and foremost
the story of Mamah's life, and although the
relationship between her and Frank is interesting,
it is the exploration of her character and the
period details that impact her life that keep the
reader enthralled, as she struggles to reconcile her
need to be with Frank, her need to be with her
children and perhaps most powerful of all, her need
to discover who she is herself.
Reviewed September 2007
This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in September 2007, and has been updated for the
April 2008 edition.
Click here to go to this issue.
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