What Makes Us Crazy?

"The Last Flapper” a play by William Luce is based on the works of Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald, better known to the world as Zelda. I’ve read most of the works of Mr. Fitzgerald and have picked up snippets of stale author gossip through other writings. But until seeing this play, I’d been ignorant of the history of her talents.
“Who gives a damn about convention? Climb to the top and live high,” Zelda says.
She was the youngest of a brood of Alabama children. Her father was imperious, and her mother infernally instructive in the ways a Southern lady should be. “A lady may cross her ankles but never her limbs.”
“Limbs,” we learn, are what a proper lady has rather than “legs.”
When Zelda longed to know how she had been as a child, her mother gave the disappointing answer, “All my children were exceptional,” offering no specifics.
Perhaps, after so many children, this mother simply didn't remember her youngest child.
Her father was inclined to answer her queries with “Ask me an easier question.”
It is little wonder she, at age 19, took off to marry that Northern novelist?
Her parents did not attend the wedding but did give her train fare as a wedding present.
Fitzgerald was a heavy drinker, and, perhaps, as is suggested in the play, a homosexual. Even so, all might have gone well with this marriage, and she might’ve stayed out of the mental hospital where she died in a fire, if Fitzgerald hadn’t worked so hard to squelch her multiple talents.
It’s claimed that she wrote many of the stories attributed to Fitzgerald, and he’s accused of lifting large sections from her diaries and letters for use in his novels. “Plagiarism begins at home,” Zelda says.
Was she born crazy, or was she made crazy? The play offers sufficient evidence to make the case that such a talented woman, given her family environment and marriage, had no choice but to escape to insanity.
There are powerful forces in human nature determined to sabotage the efforts of anyone daring to exhibit desire in the arts. Oh sure, they praise our finger paintings when we’re five, but soon enough we’re asked to wash our hands and become proper ladies (or gentlemen).
This treachery can come from within or without, and it’s pointless to place blame. But it's foolish to not admit the challenge, because a common result of this struggle is insanity, or, at least, misery.
Thank you, Zelda, for fighting the fight and for lighting the way.