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.

In this ambitious debut novel, fact and fiction blend together brilliantly. 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, leading inexorably ultimately lead to this novel’s stunning conclusion.

Elegantly written and remarkably rich in detail, Loving Frank is a fitting tribute to a courageous woman, a national icon, and their timeless love story.

Advance praise for Loving Frank:

“Loving Frank is one of those novels that takes over your life. It’s mesmerizing and fascinating–filled with complex characters, deep passions, tactile descriptions of astonishing architecture, and the colorful immediacy of daily life a hundred years ago–all gathered into a story that unfolds with riveting urgency.”
–Lauren Belfer, author of City of Light

“This graceful, assured first novel tells the remarkable story of the long-lived affair between Frank Lloyd Wright, a passionate and impossible figure, and Mamah Cheney, a married woman whom Wright beguiled and led beyond the restraint of convention. It is engrossing, provocative reading.”
——Scott Turow

“It takes great courage to write a novel about historical people, and in particular to give voice to someone as mythic as Frank Lloyd Wright. This beautifully written novel about Mamah Cheney and Frank Lloyd Wright’s love affair is vivid and intelligent, unsentimental and compassionate.”
——Jane Hamilton

“I admire this novel, adore this novel, for so many reasons: The intelligence and lyricism of the prose. The attention to period detail. The epic proportions of this most fascinating love story. Mamah Cheney has been in my head and heart and soul since reading this book; I doubt she’ll ever leave.”
–Elizabeth Berg


From the Hardcover edition.
Amazon Significant Seven, August 2007: It's a rare treasure to find a historically imagined novel that is at once fully versed in the facts and unafraid of weaving those truths into a story that dares to explore the unanswered questions. Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Cheney's love story is--as many early reviews of Loving Frank have noted--little-known and often dismissed as scandal. In Nancy Horan's skillful hands, however, what you get is two fully realized people, entirely, irrepressibly, in love. Together, Frank and Mamah are a wholly modern portrait, and while you can easily imagine them in the here and now, it's their presence in the world of early 20th century America that shades how authentic and, ultimately, tragic their story is. Mamah's bright, earnest spirit is particularly tender in the context of her time and place, which afforded her little opportunity to realize the intellectual life for which she yearned. Loving Frank is a remarkable literary achievement, tenderly acute and even-handed in even the most heartbreaking moments, and an auspicious debut from a writer to watch. --Anne Bartholomew

Customer Rating:
Summary: Dewey, the special library cat.
Comment: This is a very touching story of an extraordinary cat who becomes the "King" of the a local Iowa library. He brings in people of all ages to the library to read, check out books, listen to stories read and/or to just sit and snuggle with Dewey, the orange marmalade tabby cat. It is a enjoyable read and very emotional. My only complaint was that the author spent too much of her time telling her story and all of the problems of her family instead of just letting Dewey be the star. She injected too much of her into the book and I felt it was distracting and took away from Dewey's story.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent story blending fiction and nonfiction
Comment: Fantastic story -- takes a bit of time to get into the plot, but provides many thought-provoking issues which are still applicable today.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Dull dull dull
Comment: I was extremely excited to read this book. Note on the 'was excited'....bottom line is this book was plodding at best. I found I had to force myself to read it and often times used it as a sleep aid!

Although FLW was undoubtedly an amazing architect he was by far one of the least likable humans on this earth! Selfish and self-absorbed even with those that he supposedly loved! Mamah was also selfish and self-absorbed AND totally annoying BUT at least she had moments of clarity where I think it bothered her that she had chosen the path she chose and she at least had a bit of guilt over what she had done to her family and her children.
I found Nancy Horan's writing akin to watching paint dry. She seemed to spend a lot of time on nothing and very little time and effort on the parts that deserved the attention,
I must say that at the end of this book I felt like someone had slammed my head against a wall after a verrrrry long slow train ride that at the last second sped up and took a sharp left turn! OUCH!

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Loving Frank
Comment: This is a compelling story which for the most part is conveyed in plain, simple, and often pedestrian prose. No doubt the author decided that the plot was so riveting that the appropriate style should be understated, but I think she took this approach to far. Most of the book could have benefited from the kind of lyricism displayed in its concluding chapters. I am nonetheless glad I read it. I had seen the PBS documentary on the Wright-Borthwick romance, so the events were not a surprise, but the novel did bring them to life. This is not a great book, but its story is worth hearing. In some respects Wright and Borthwick were ahead of their time, but whenever the well being of children is a factor whether to stay or leave a stale marriage remains a difficult dilemma.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Quite an intriguing story...
Comment: As a designer living in Los Angeles, FLW looms fairly large in my world as a general influence on the architecture and aesthetic of the 20th century. I don't know much about him, but I know I can't throw a rock without hitting a FLW building, FLW furniture at the flea market, or some kind of design element influenced by him. Therefore, even on a base level, it was interesting to read this book just to glean some insight on the history of his career, if only for the period of time he was with Mamah Cheney. However, I found myself enjoying the novel purely for the fictionalized aspects of the relationship as well as the elements of truth.

The thing that always gets me about biographies is that somehow, they are all the same. Perhaps it's the lives that are chosen to be depicted, or just the structure inherent in describing the course of a life, but they always follow the same pattern, a sort of rise-fall-rise so we're left with the idea that we should be elevated by how this person pulled themselves out of the pit to end in triumph. Interestingly, this is not the case with this book, which might also be its problem. I had no idea who Mamah Cheney was, much less about her life works and what happened at the end of her life, so things were somewhat of a shock to me because they lacked the typical rigid structure I've always found in biographies. Mamah's actions happened with little preparation and played out with even less understanding. This might be the way it actually happened, or, by the author's own admittance, it might not; but regardless, it was a curiously jarring series of events culminating in a truly bizarre conclusion.

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