This week I read “Loving Frank” by Nancy Horan.
Guys. I did not like this book. Such a disappointment.
It tells the story of Frank Lloyd Wright’s affair with the wife of one of his clients, Mamah. The story is told from Mamah’s point of view, and tells how they both ended up abandoning their families and living abroad together and then finally settling down in Wisconsin to live together there. I had very conflicting emotions throughout the whole thing and never really picked a side – the book really presented the struggle of a situation like that – part of you realizes that if you are no longer happy with your spouse and have fallen in love with someone else, the honest thing to do is be with the one you love, but at the same time, it’s still not okay to just abandon your young children. It was even more complex because this all took place in the early 1900s, where it was a much bigger scandal to get a divorce – Frank’s wife refused to even give him one for the entirety of the years that he was living with Mamah.
AND, on top of all the conflict I was feeling about the whole abandonment thing, the book basically ends with one of their hired helpers going insane while Frank was away, setting fire to their house, and killing seven people, including Mamah and her children, with an ax! Are you kidding? This was based on the true events of what happened, so Nancy Horan couldn’t really decide how Frank and Mamah’s story ended, but come on! Makes for a really crappy way to end what was kind of a love story! I was not pleased.
I did, however, enjoy getting a glimpse into the life of Frank Lloyd Wright. Granted this was fiction, and was more about his love life than his work life, but I think architecture is really, really cool. My arts administration classes that I’ve taken at school are technically architecture classes, and we’ve had some super interesting lectures from architects. Wright’s work was really progressive for the time, and he was strongly influenced by the idea of harmony between people and the environment which tugs at my went-to-an-environmental-science-governor’s-school heartstrings. 🙂 Nature and music were a huge inspiration to his work. Check out the Wikipedia article I linked to above, I’ve totally been geekin’ reading it!
If you wanna learn more about him, look online or read a biography. Maybe skip this book. You can find a much more satisfying love story elsewhere that doesn’t deal with abandoning children… or ax murderers… Buh.
Life in Jennyral 