Alabama Song

Written in a woman’s voice, Alabama Song lends its “I” to Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, the writer’s wife, as a narrator both feverish and lucid: from Montgomery to New York and then the Côte d’Azur, she recounts the intoxication of the Roaring Twenties, the drinking, the hospitalizations, and above all the struggle — of love and pride — with the writer she inspired and paid for with her own life. Neither pastiche nor biography, the novel asserts its fictional freedom against the golden legend of the Fitzgeralds, achieving the rare feat of restoring the sinew of a life to a myth.

Awarded at Drouant on November 5, 2007, the prize was won after a marathon vote lasting fourteen rounds — a rare occurrence since the introduction of this cap on the number of rounds — a sign of a winner chosen after a genuine literary standoff. Assouline commented: “Fourteen rounds of voting is, at the very least, a sign of a problem […]. Gilles Leroy took no risks, and he takes none for his readers. It will certainly be an honest Goncourt in terms of sales. As for Amélie Nothomb’s novel, which a good part of the press had hastily crowned in advance, it will get the Prix de Flore instead.”

Publisher’s wraparound band, issued at publication, preserved.