What prompted you to write a novel based on F. Scott Fitzgeralds romance with Ginevra King?
The inspiration for Gatsby’s Girl came in the summer of 2001 when I was at Ragdale, an artists’ colony in Lake Forest, Illinois. I was flipping through a history of Lake Forest and came across a photograph of an elegant Georgian mansion dropped in the middle of a treeless prairie. The caption read: Home of banker Charles King. F. Scott Fitzgerald was smitten by his daughter, Ginevra, and made an unhappy visit there in 1916. She later provided the inspiration for Daisy Buchanan. I found myself thinking about Ginevra King for the rest of the day. Who was she, and what happened to her after she broke off her relationship with Fitzgerald when she was seventeen? How did she feel about appearing again and again in Fitzgerald’s fiction? I called the archivist at Lake Forest College and left a voicemail message asking if he had any information about Ginevra King. Two hours later, I heard a knock on my studio door, and there was the archivist with a stack of books and magazine articles. I felt
