F. Scott Fitzgerald has been my favorite author since I was 12. From the second that I read The Great Gatsby the summer before 8th grade (in anticipation of the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio, not gonna lie), I was hooked. I fell in love with the characters, likable or not, the flowery language, and the messages of love, life, and loss. Naturally, because I need to know as much information as humanly possible about the things that interest me, I dug deeper, and that's when I started to love Scott Fitzgerald's wife, Zelda.
Zelda Fitzgerald (neé Sayer) was a badass. She didn't care what people thought of her, she drank, smoked, partied, kissed all the boys she wanted to, and did everything in between that was "unladylike" for her time. Scott deemed her "the first American flapper," and she has often been seen as an embodiment of the 20s as a whole. So many of Scott's characters are based on his wife, and many of his stories and books are dedicated "To Zelda." Their love and life story was not perfect, and frankly was riddled with some pretty messed up things, but they were both remarkable people who left remarkable legacies.
When I found out that Amazon Prime was releasing a show about Scott and Zelda, I think I might've screamed in the middle of the nail salon I was in at the time. I waited for a few weeks, then excitedly downloaded the first three episodes so that I could watch them on an airplane ride. I settled in, popped in my earbuds, and just like that, I was thrown into Montgomery, Alabama in 1917.
"Z: The Beginning of Everything" chronicles Scott and Zelda'a life together, from the moment they met, him, a young soldier, striving to write his first novel, and her, a vivacious and self-confident young woman who lived according to her own rules. The first season details their beginnings, how Scott eventually won the heart of Zelda and she finally left the small world of Montgomery to get married in New York City, to Scott's first novel (This Side of Paradise in 1920) attracting major success, to the starts of the incessant and outlandish partying that they became known for (and synonymous of), and slowly detailing the downward spiral of their tumultuous marriage. While the show goes through a large timespan in only a season, and season two is unconfirmed as of yet, it so far seems to be an accurate and triumphant feat.
The only grievance I have against the show, and only because I know Scott's novels so well, is that the writers are very clearly trying to insert as many of his memorable quotes into his dialogue as possible. Granted, I love so many of the lines that they've already used, but casually dropping them in the middle of conversations seems a little too meta. At the beginning of the season, Zelda and Scott are walking in a cemetery discussing humans and human nature, and Scott loosely quotes from The Great Gatsby, "And in the end, we were all just humans... drunk on the idea that love, only love, could heal our brokenness.” I wasn't alive in the early 1900s (sadly), so I don't know if or when Scott originally said the lines he would later feature in his novels, but it's still a little cringe-inducing.
The show is titled "Z: The Beginning of Everything" because of one of Scott's most famous statements about his wife. He wrote in a letter, "I love her, and that's the beginning and end of everything." The love and pure adoration between the two is always present, and the show reinforces the idea that Scott and Zelda were not always symbols of one of America's most glamorous decades; they were just people from quiet towns that found each other in a crowded dance hall.
Zelda Fitzgerald was, and is, one of the toughest and fiercest women that has ever graced literature and history. She wrote, "She refused to be bored, chiefly because she wasn't boring." Zelda Fitzgerald was far from boring, and the world is finally getting to see the side of her story that is so often overshadowed. She wasn't just Scott's muse, or the iconic party girl that she was so often seen as; she was Zelda, and that was (and is) so much more than enough.
