On My Grandfather’s Novel

I never met my grandparents: Scott died young, in 1940 at the age of forty-four. I was born in 1948. Zelda wrote my mother from Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, “I long to see the baby,” but she perished in a fire a couple of months later. Fortunately, both of my grandparents left such a trove of intimate letters and blazingly honest essays that I feel I have come to know them.