"Loving Frank"

After mentioning Book Club on Twitter last night, I have several people contact me to find out what we were reading and what we thought of it.


While it was a lovely social evening, with the craziness of summer, only three of us had read the book.  So there wasn't a lot of great discussion about the book itself.


Who am I kidding, discussion of the book itself just isn't one of the fortes of my book club.


So I thought I'd talk about it here.  I've actually been toying with the idea for awhile...the idea of doing some kind of a virtual book club alongside my face-to-face one. 

So here goes.  The book this month was "Loving Frank" by Nancy Horan.  It is the fictionalized biographical account of Mamah Cheney and Frank Lloyd Wright's love affair.  While the author did a tremendous amount of research into the life of Cheney and Wright, this is an intensely personal novel about their relationship, and thus the fiction part.


For those of you who know anything about their story, to call it scandalous would be an understatement.  Cheney and Wright were both married with children.  They met at the turn of the century while he designed a home for she and her husband in Oak Park, Illinois.  From there an affair developed resulting in both of them walking away from their families and moving to Europe.


I won't give the rest of it away, but I have loved this book.  Not only is it exceptionally written, but it really makes you stop and think.  Cheney had been involved in the women's movement in Chicago but there is an undercurrent of frustration that so much of the movement, to that point, had been focused on the right to vote and on equal pay.  But not on true equality.


So when she makes the decision to have the relationship with Wright, the scandal it brings is magnified by the questions about the roles and rights of women.


Again, while, clearly a book of this nature took great creative license in fictionalizing their converstions and emotions, you can't help but feel that you are walking away knowing quite a bit more about who these two complex people were.


Semi-spoiler alert, so skip this if you don't already know what happened!
For those of you know know a bit about their story and Taliesen, you know it ends tragically.  And it does.  While one of the women who read the book found the abrupt tragic ending disappointing, I think knowing that this was where it had to be heading, I wasn't bothered by it.  Just saddened by how her difficult life ended. 
Okay, spoiler alert is over.

Have you read Loving Frank?  What did you think?

And if you'd like to check back in next month, up next is The Road, by Cormac McCarthy.




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