I started this book and decided I really wasn’t interested in reading a story about F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood at that particular moment, preferring something lighter and fluffier. But I decided to read a few pages, and the next thing I knew I’d finished the book.
Graham led an extraordinary life, rising from being abandoned at a Jewish orphanage and forging a new existence as a successful gossip columnist in Hollywood. She felt she and Fitzgerald were soulmates, but his alcoholism and his own anti-Semitism constantly tested their relationship as did Graham’s lifelong pattern of lies.
Author Sally Koslow’s fictional version of the romance between gossip columnist Sheilah Graham and Fitzgerald reads like a memoir but moves with the speed of a page-turner. The voice she gives Sheilah is nuanced and touching; the prose itself is richly detailed and evokes the glamour. What is unexpected is Koslow’s portrayal of the dark underbelly of Hollywood with its anti-Semitism.
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