Loving Frank - Hardcover

Horan, Nancy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0345494997 ISBN 13: 9780345494993

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 2007

Synopsis

I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current.

So writes Mamah Borthwick Cheney in her diary as she struggles to justify her clandestine love affair with Frank Lloyd Wright. Four years earlier, in 1903, Mamah and her husband, Edwin, had commissioned the renowned architect to design a new home for them. During the construction of the house, a powerful attraction developed between Mamah and Frank, and in time the lovers, each married with children, embarked on a course that would shock Chicago society and forever change their lives.

In this ambitious debut novel, fact and fiction blend together brilliantly. While scholars have largely relegated Mamah to a footnote in the life of America’s greatest architect, author Nancy Horan gives full weight to their dramatic love story and illuminates Cheney’s profound influence on Wright.

Drawing on years of research, Horan weaves little-known facts into a compelling narrative, vividly portraying the conflicts and struggles of a woman forced to choose between the roles of mother, wife, lover, and intellectual. Horan’s Mamah is a woman seeking to find her own place, her own creative calling in the world. Mamah’s is an unforgettable journey marked by choices that reshape her notions of love and responsibility, leading inexorably ultimately lead to this novel’s stunning conclusion.

Elegantly written and remarkably rich in detail, Loving Frank is a fitting tribute to a courageous woman, a national icon, and their timeless love story.

Advance praise for Loving Frank:

“Loving Frank is one of those novels that takes over your life. It’s mesmerizing and fascinating–filled with complex characters, deep passions, tactile descriptions of astonishing architecture, and the colorful immediacy of daily life a hundred years ago–all gathered into a story that unfolds with riveting urgency.”
–Lauren Belfer, author of City of Light

“This graceful, assured first novel tells the remarkable story of the long-lived affair between Frank Lloyd Wright, a passionate and impossible figure, and Mamah Cheney, a married woman whom Wright beguiled and led beyond the restraint of convention. It is engrossing, provocative reading.”
——Scott Turow

“It takes great courage to write a novel about historical people, and in particular to give voice to someone as mythic as Frank Lloyd Wright. This beautifully written novel about Mamah Cheney and Frank Lloyd Wright’s love affair is vivid and intelligent, unsentimental and compassionate.”
——Jane Hamilton

“I admire this novel, adore this novel, for so many reasons: The intelligence and lyricism of the prose. The attention to period detail. The epic proportions of this most fascinating love story. Mamah Cheney has been in my head and heart and soul since reading this book; I doubt she’ll ever leave.”
–Elizabeth Berg

About this title

Review:

Loving Frank is one of those novels that takes over your life. It's mesmerizing and fascinating filled with complex characters, deep passions, tactile descriptions of astonishing architecture, and the colorful immediacy of daily life a hundred years ago all gathered into a story that unfolds with riveting urgency. (Lauren Belfer, author of City of Light)

This graceful, assured first novel . . . is engrossing, provocative reading. (Scott Turow)

A riveting historical novel. (Seattle Post-Intelligencer)

Horan does an impressive job of rescuing Mamah from the footnotes of history . . . This compelling read sheds light on an ill-fated relationship from the foundations up (Independent)

Outstanding... Nancy Horan has found an untold tale of a famous couple that rocked society at the start of the last century, and she tells it with gut wrenching raw emotion that could not fail to stir even the hardest heart. (Daily Mail)

Enthralling (New York Times)

A novel of impressive scope and ambition (Washington Post)

From the Author:

Loving Frank is a work of fiction based on events relating to the love affair of a brilliant, controversial architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, and one of his clients, Mamah Borthwick Cheney. Mamah, along with her husband Edwin Cheney, commissioned Wright in 1903 to design a house for their family on East Avenue in Oak Park, Illinois. This book portrays the period 1907 to 1914, during which the Wright/Cheney affair flourished.

Anyone who lives in Oak Park, as I did for 24 years, quickly absorbs information about Frank Lloyd Wright. The village was a growing suburb of Chicago in 1889, when the architect designed a home for his wife Catherine, himself, and their family, which eventually grew to six children. In time, Oak Park became Wright's laboratory during his `prairie period', when he refined, with each new house he created, his evolving ideas about organic architecture. Today, especially in summer, Oak Park's streets are peopled with tourists from around the world who come to see the many houses he designed there and to experience firsthand the architect's legendary spaces. Wright is Oak Park's most famous citizen (Ernest Hemingway runs a close second), and his home and studio complex has been restored to its appearance as it was in 1909, the year the architect left town.

I don't remember when I first learned about Mamah Borthwick Cheney, but I recall vividly a long-ago tour I took of his home and studio, at the end of which someone asked, `Why did Wright leave in 1909?' While the name of Mamah Cheney was not included in the answer, the tour guide explained the awkward truth: the famous architect, who had celebrated in his buildings the values of family and home, had departed for Europe in 1909 with the wife of a client, never to reside permanently with his family again.

Eventually I learned that Mamah and Edwin Cheney's house was just a few blocks north of my own home on East Avenue. I had passed the house many times on my morning walks, unaware of its history. Upon learning a few facts about Mamah, I found myself pausing in front of the low-slung brick house, wanting to know more.

Very little information has been available about Wright's relationship with Mamah Cheney. The architect's biographers have lamented the lack of any remaining correspondence between the two. In the absence of personal papers belonging to Mamah, I pieced together what details of her life I could find in old newspapers, memoirs by Oak Parkers, census reports, histories of the places she lived, books on women's roles during the early part of the 20th century, and Wright's brief account of her in his autobiography, in which he chose to call her `faithful comrade' rather than to reveal her name. How thrilling it was, then, to discover two years into the project the existence of ten letters Mamah wrote to Ellen Key, the Swedish feminist for whom she translated. Here was Mamah's own voice! In a few sentences here and there Mamah Borthwick Cheney opened her heart and revealed her innermost feelings to the woman she'd chosen to be her mentor. The details provided by the correspondence helped me form a clearer picture of who she was and what her life was like during her affair with Wright.

About this edition

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0345494997
• ISBN 13: 9780345494993
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 362