Alabama Song

A novel narrated in a woman’s voice, Alabama Song lends its “I” to Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, wife of the famous writer, both feverish and lucid: from Montgomery to New York and then to the Côte d’Azur, she recounts the intoxication of the Jazz Age, the alcohol, the confinements in asylums, and above all the struggle — of love and pride — with the writer she inspired and paid for with her own self. Neither pastiche nor biography, the book pits novelistic freedom against the golden legend of the Fitzgerald couple, achieving the rare feat of restoring to a myth the sinew of a life.

Awarded at Drouant on November 5, 2007, the Prix Goncourt was won after a marathon vote lasting fourteen rounds — a rare occurrence since the introduction of this maximum number of rounds — a sign of a laureate chosen at the end of a genuine literary tug-of-war. 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 either. 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 Goncourt-worthy, it will get the Prix de Flore instead.”

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