Its publication did not ease any of the tensions between the Fitzgeralds. Zelda wanted to continue to write, while Scott told her she was “a third-rate writer and a third-rate ballet dancer … I am a professional writer, with a huge following. I am the highest-paid short story writer in the world.” During the boat journey to Europe, a storm hits and Alabama is anxious throughout a lot of the journey. She spends much of her time cooped up in her cabin with Bonnie while David drinks with friends at the bar. They arrive in France, and find a house to settle into. David spends all his time working on his painting, and Alabama feels alone. One day, she meets Jacques, a handsome French aviation officer, and becomes fascinated by him. They begin an affair, and David becomes jealous as the couple’s relationship becomes strained. Eventually, Jacques leaves for China and Alabama is heartbroken. Save Me the Waltz is the only novel ever written by Zelda Fitzgerald, the wife of famous American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Published in 1932, it was written in six weeks while Zelda was hospitalized for schizophrenia. It is a semi-autobiographical account of her relationship with Scott, providing insight into their disturbed marriage.

In Winter of 1929, Zelda Fitzgerald's mental health abruptly deteriorated. [15] During an automobile trip to Paris along the mountainous roads of the Grande Corniche, Zelda seized the car's steering wheel and tried to kill herself, her husband F. Scott Fitzgerald, and their 9-year-old daughter Scottie by driving over a cliff. [16] Zelda also faced challenges in the ballet studio. In her mid-twenties, she was too old to achieve her dream of becoming a prima ballerina, but she could still have made a career out of it had her health not failed. As a child and teenager, Zelda had been an accomplished dancer. She had also written a few short “guest celebrity” pieces early in her marriage, including a review of Scott’s novel The Beautiful and the Damned, but as a woman and wife of a famous author, she was not expected to have the talent of her own. However, Zelda found that she had no desire to be simply a wife and mother and muse to her husband. It wasn’t the first time that the lines between fact and fiction had become blurred. Scott, too, often conflated fantasy and reality in his novels: he once said to Malcolm Crowley, “Sometimes I don’t know whether Zelda isn’t a character that I created myself.”The rich prose style has also been connected to Surrealism, in its attempts to disrupt realism by creating unexpected connections. In the novel, Alabama’s first kiss with David becomes a deep, nightmarish dive into the frontal cortex of his brain: Having been forbidden by Scott to use any autobiographical material that might coincide with what he wanted to use for Tender Is the Night, Zelda struggled even for a storyline. It was performed by a small Baltimore theatre company in 1933, but its rambling banter only confused the critics. Still mentally unstable, in and out of psychiatric clinics, and at odds with her husband much of the time, Zelda then turned to paint instead. She chose Max Perkins, her husband’s own editor, writing to him, “Scott completely being absorbed in his own [novel] has not seen it, so I am completely in the dark as to its possible merits but naturally terribly anxious that you should like it.” I was also afraid we might have touched on the same material. Also, feeling it to be a dubious production due to my own instability I did not want a scathing criticism such as you to have mercilessly — if for my own good given my last stories, poor things. I have had enough discouragement, generally, and could scream with that sense of inertia that hovers over my life and everything I do.” In part, then, it’s Zelda’s story the way that her husband wanted it to be told, but there are still elements that are very different from Scott’s and that can therefore be assumed are Zelda’s unique style — lush description, vivid colors, a southern summer brought to life in dripping heat and suffocating magnolias, the anguish and pain of obsession and alcoholism, and the frantic search for an identity outside of marriage.

They get engaged, David telling her father that he has some money from his family. As the war carries on, David is sent away and they both have affairs with other people. Neither seems to mind too much, and they get married when the war ends. Alabama leaves her parents’ house behind, thinking that she will miss them both. She does not know how poor David truly is, but they are both happy to have each other. Scott, on the other hand, didn’t appreciate Zelda doing the same thing. While his side of the correspondence has been lost, he must have sent Zelda a curt reply to her explanatory letter, because, in her next letter to him, Zelda wrote: In the autumn of 1929, she was offered a salaried position with the San Carlo Opera Ballet Company in Naples, dancing a solo role initially in Aida with more solos to follow during the season, but had to decline the offer as she was not mentally capable of fulfilling the demanding contract. These lessons were reluctantly paid for by Scott, an arrangement which Zelda also disliked intensely. To support herself and to be able to pay for her own lessons, she began to write again. Articles and short stories including Our Movie Queen, Miss Ella, and A Couple of Nuts were published in Harper’s Weekly, The Smart Set, and The Saturday Evening Post. It is not only that her publishers have not seen fit to curb an almost ludicrous lushness of writing but they have not given the book the elementary services of a literate proofreader." [40]Fitzgerald’s semi-autobiographical novel is a wonderfully detailed account of a couple, who despite their misgivings and fights, loved each other greatly. This account, albeit partly fictional, of the Fitzgeralds’ marriage, portrays the people behind the larger-than-life legends and the emotional truth of their lives. Fitzgerald, F. Scott (July 1966) [January 1940], Turnbull, Andrew (ed.), The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons– via Internet Archive Alabama Beggs is a Southern belle who makes her début into adulthood with wild parties, dancing and drinking, and flirting with the young officers posted to her hometown during World War I. When Lieutenant David Knight arrives to join her line of suitors, Alabama marries him—and their life in New York, Paris, and the South of France closely mirrors the Fitzgeralds' own life and their prominent socializing in the 1920s and 1930s. In Paris, Alabama becomes fixated on becoming a prima ballerina and refuses to accept that she might not become the great dancer that she longs to be, threatening her mental health and her marriage.

Turnbull, Andrew (1962) [1954], Scott Fitzgerald, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, LCCN 62-9315– via Internet Archive Cline, Sally (2003), Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise, New York: Arcade Publishing, ISBN 1-55970-688-0– via Internet Archive Milford, Nancy (1970), Zelda: A Biography, New York: Harper & Row, LCCN 66-20742– via Internet ArchiveAlabama grows further apart from her husband and their daughter. Determined to be famous, an aging Alabama aspires to become a renowned prima ballerina and devotes herself relentlessly to this ambition. She is offered an opportunity to dance featured parts with a prestigious company in Naples—and she takes it, and goes to live in the city alone. Alabama dances her solo debut in the opera Faust. However, a blister soon becomes infected from the glue in the box of her pointe shoe, leading to blood poisoning, and Alabama can never dance again. Though outwardly successful, Alabama and David are miserable. Written in six weeks and drawing from the life she shared with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz is a classic novel of one woman's experience in a fast-moving Jazz Age society. However she is defined, perhaps her greatest achievement was summed up by Therese Anne Fowler, who wrote:

Zelda did start another novel, Caesar’s Things, and worked on it intermittently for the rest of her life. It never came to anything. She also turned to scriptwriting and attempted to produce a play called Scandalabra, described as a fantasy farce in a prologue and three acts.

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French identity cards for the Fitzgeralds circa 1929, the year in which Zelda's mental health deteriorated.