Loving Frank

I have been observing life as it floats past from the sidelines. It's the river I want to swim in. I'm hoping to sense the flow.

In her journal, Mamah Borthwick Cheney strives to explain away her secretive relationship with Frank Lloyd Wright. The famous architect had been hired by Mamah and her husband Edwin to create a new mansion four years before, in 1903. Mamah and Frank were very attracted to each other while the home was being built, and eventually the married couple with kids started a journey that would shock Chicago society and alter their lives forever.

This ambitious first work skillfully combines fiction and actuality. While most academics have essentially written Mamah off as a minor character in the life of the greatest architect in America, author Nancy Horan highlights Cheney's significant effect on Wright and gives full weight to their tumultuous love story.

Horan's captivating novel skillfully depicts the hardships and tensions faced by a woman who must choose between her duties as a mother, wife, lover, and intellectual, based on years of study and little-known facts. Mamah, played by Horan, is a lady who is looking for her own space in the world and her own artistic calling. Mamah's journey is one she will never forget, filled with decisions that forever alter her perceptions of duty and love, and which inescapably lead to the breathtaking denouement of this book.

Loving Frank, a beautifully written and astonishingly detailed book, pays homage to a brave lady, a national treasure, and their enduring love story.