Status Updates From The Beautiful and Damned

Anthony and Gloria falling in love and getting married is only a small portion of the story. Fitzgerald at this point gets into the crux of two people finding out how to live with each other, with squabbles and fights and sweetness. Some of the fights are petty, and some of them betray a masculine menace that Anthony embodies when he is tired of deferring to the mercurial Gloria’s whims (and also drunk).

A lot of this book is profoundly psychological insights into Anthony’s thought process in wooing women and being completely taken aback by Gloria’s refusal to adhere to the pathways in which he has tread. At this point the diary that Gloria reads through is one of my favorite sections, but of course it is liberally selected from (and without permission) the one Zelda actually kept…

ngl, in my head this had always been “The Beautiful and THE Damned”. I am less partial to Anthony’s character as we don’t get the depth of background that exists in This Side of Paradise, but both characters were dominated by a loathing of the “ugly”. I do recognize that this again autobiographical novel is based on his courtship and marriage to Zelda, so it’s interesting here as well.

I think that F. Scott Fitzgerald just loves to write books about pussy ass dudes being infatuated with girls. At first it was gatsby who had everything in the world but was such a frail man that he was stuck up on a girl that had a husband and it literally drove him crazy, but now we have Anthony. He’s obsessed with this chick who is quite literally known for being a hoe. I am excited to see where this goes though