Loving Frank

New York Times bestseller

“I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current.”

So writes Mamah Borthwick Cheney in her diary as she struggles to justify her clandestine love affair with Frank Lloyd Wright. Four years earlier, in 1903, Mamah and her husband, Edwin, had commissioned the renowned architect to design a new home for them. During the construction of the house, a powerful attraction developed between Mamah and Frank, and in time the lovers, each married with children, embarked on a course that would shock Chicago society and forever change their lives.

While scholars have largely relegated Mamah to a footnote in the life of America’s greatest architect, author Nancy Horan gives full weight to their dramatic love story and illuminates Cheney’s profound influence on Wright.

Drawing on years of research, Horan weaves little-known facts into a compelling narrative, vividly portraying the conflicts and struggles of a woman forced to choose between the roles of mother, wife, lover, and intellectual. Horan’s Mamah is a woman seeking to find her own place, her own creative calling in the world. Mamah’s is an unforgettable journey marked by choices that reshape her notions of love and responsibility, choices that ultimately lead to this novel’s stunning conclusion.

Awarded the Best Historical Fiction Prize by the Society of American Historians in 2009

PRAISE & REVIEWS

“LOVING FRANK, an enthralling first novel by Nancy Horan, is set at the same time as Doctorow’s modern classic—the decade before World War I—and recreates its weld of fact and fiction, wrapped around the core theme of female self-actualization. Unlike the wife in Ragtime, however, the woman under scrutiny in Horan’s book actually lived … The conversations [Horan] invents between Mamah and Frank, as between all of the characters, proceed with unforced ease, enfolding multiple layers of their personal and professional lives, touching on poetry, translation, architecture, idealism, love and family. At a distance of a hundred years, these conversations can hardly be actual, but Horan makes them plausible and engrossing. …. In LOVING FRANK, bringing the buried truths of the ill-starred relationship of Mamah Borthwick Cheney and Frank Lloyd Wright to light, Horan only increases her heroine’s mystery. Mamah Borthwick Cheney wasn’t just any woman, but Horan makes her into an enigmatic Everywoman—a symbol of both the freedoms women yearn to have and of the consequences that may await when they try to take them.”
—New York Times Book Review

“A transporting drama … LOVING FRANK humanizes its main characters so successfully that [what made Frank and Mamah sever their family ties] seems no mystery at all … truly artful fiction.”
— New York Times

“Nancy Horan’s thoughtful debut novel, LOVING FRANK, is the perfect selection to jump-start some satisfyingly heated arguments within your book club. … The best part of the novel is the way Horan makes Cheney’s behavior understandable … You empathize with the doomed Mamah Cheney. But you also think about the moral implications of sacrificing one’s children vs. sacrificing for the love of a man of genius. I still can’t decide how I feel about her. Perhaps that is Horan’s point. This is one complicated story—let the book clubs thrash it out.”
—USA Today

“An amazing story.”
—Susan Stamberg, National Public Radio

“Horan proves masterful at evoking Wright’s stunning structures and the expansive feeling of standing inside them.”
—People (Critic’s Choice, 3 ½ stars)

“This gripping historical novel offers new insight into the mind of an American icon through the woman he loved.”
—PARADE

“Fascinating … an exploration of the human costs of moving outside of society’s rules. … Horan excels at research, and does an admirable job of recreating the five or so years [that Mamah Cheney and Frank Lloyd Wright] were together. … The fact that Horan is able to make a reader care about Cheney after [she leaves her children] is a testament to both her writing ability and the complexity of her heroine.”
—Christian Science Monitor

“[Horan] does well to avoid serving up a bodice-ripper for the smart set….She succeeds in conveying the emotional center of her protagonist, whom she paints as a proto-feminist, an educated woman fettered by the role of bourgeois matriarch.”
—The New Yorker

“This novel is so great, it’s hard to believe it’s the author’s first.”
—Jane

“LOVING FRANK is a glory to behold. … at its heart this is a book about one of architectural history’s most difficult relationships.”
—New York Magazine

“If you know anything about the scandal that ensued when Frank Lloyd Wright, the most iconic American architect of all time, and the wife of one of his clients became lovers, you may also wonder why no one wrote about the affair. But after reading LOVING FRANK, Nancy Horan’s novelization of the story, you will be happy that someone with Horan’s sensitivity and storytelling gifts has finally done so. … Horan’s sympathetic but measured account of how Wright and Cheney come to recognize each other as fellow ‘outsiders’ who sacrifice their children and families on the altar of their yearnings, is disturbing but also disturbingly logical in its own way. Horan’s fascinating story not only reveals much about the flawed genius and his lonely mistress but also offers a powerful commentary on an era when American feminists focused, as Mamah observes, on the right to vote while ignoring the right to a ‘fully realized selfhood.’ Horan’s novel would be worth reading for this alone, but LOVING FRANK reveals as well what we expect to get from great fiction: timeless truths about ourselves.”
—New York Daily News

“Horan’s nuanced evocation of these flawed human beings plays beautifully against the lurid facts of their situation. As in the best historical fiction, she finds both the truth and the heart of her story.”
—Los Angeles Times

“In Mamah, Horan creates an unforgettably complex heroine—and the perfect conduit through which to explore the shifting social mores of the time.”
—Washington Post

“LOVING FRANK is a novel of impressive scope and ambition.”
—Washington Post Book World

“As Frank and Mamah’s love affair advances toward its sad conclusion, the powerful writing imbues the tale with the terrible inevitability of a Greek tragedy.”
—Chicago Magazine

“An impressive and admirable debut. … If Frank Lloyd Wright is the reason people will pick up this book, Mamah Borthwick is the reason they will keep reading it. … Horan writes graceful, at times riveting prose … LOVING FRANK [is] a beautifully designed, innovative and noteworthy work of art in itself.”
—Chicago Tribune

“In her debut novel, LOVING FRANK, author Nancy Horan has transformed the half-forgotten affair into a compelling tale of love, loss and wrenching sacrifices. Horan has brought Mamah to life by combing newspapers, letters and Frank’s autobiography, then drawing from her keen imagination to fill the gaps between facts. The resulting character is a spirited and very real woman who wrestles with what it means to be Frank’s partner and simultaneously a mother, a feminist and an intellectual in the early 20th century. … Horan draws Frank’s character with so many vivid dimensions that he nearly jumps off the pages to stride through the room. … Horan writes with liveliness, yet her language becomes artfully spare as she leads up to the shocker at the end of the book. The last few chapters are written and paced in such a way that even if you know the story of what happened at Taliesin, you won’t be able to tear yourself away. And when it’s all over, Mamah and her struggles are likely to stay with you for a long time.”
—Seattle Times

“Novelist Horan skillfully recreates worlds both at home and abroad that bring those times—pre-women’s suffrage, pre-totalitarianism, pre-civil rights—vividly back to life. She has taken an uncomfortable, even lurid, story and given us the background to appreciate and understand the impulses behind it.”
—The Olympian