Author Therese Anne Fowler fictionalizes the life of Zelda Fitzgerald in her new novel "Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald".

Author Therese Anne Fowler's new novel "Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald", which will be hitting stores soon, tells a fictionalized story of the life of Zelda Fitzgerald, her Alabama upbringing, till the death of her husband in 1940.

Zelda married F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1920 when he was still in basic training and she was still to be discovered by the world. What followed was a turbulent marriage filled with personal and professional jealousy, alcohol abuse and mental illness.

Fowler talks to NPR to reveal more about her novel:

On the popular misrepresentation of Zelda

"I went looking for some preliminary information, and very quickly was struck by the way the surface-level knowledge about Zelda doesn't begin to describe the person that she really is. You know, I had come to the project with the idea that she was just F. Scott Fitzgerald's crazy, disruptive wife. I didn't really know anything about her. And very quickly I recognized that she was very, you know, badly misrepresented in popular culture. So the more I learned, the more compelled I was to set the record straight - it became kind of a mission."

On Zelda's relationship with Ernest Hemingway

"You know, initially [Hemingway] did like Zelda. And that was what was so interesting, is Hemingway's letters to Scott during that time are actually filled with a lot of warmth in regards to Zelda. And then there comes this point in time when suddenly the warmth is gone. You know, Zelda always was a little bit skeptical about his talents, but I think she was OK with him as a person, initially, until some event occurred. And I think, you know, through deductive reasoning, the possibilities are small, and I had to make an executive decision about how to represent that."

On Hemingway's jealousy of Zelda's closeness with F. Scott

"I think that Zelda's relationship with Scott was unusual for married women at that time. They had this, some people might even call it a kind of codependency between them, and Hemingway wasn't accustomed to that kind of, you know, marital relationship. His friendships with men tended to be friendships with men. And the Fitzgeralds were very much a pair."

On F. Scott's recognition of Zelda's talent as a writer

"He had a very interesting duality when it came to Zelda and her writing. He was proud of Zelda's abilities, but possibly because ... as it came easily to her, it was becoming increasingly difficult for him, he couldn't help but feel competitive."

On whether Zelda should have found somebody else

"People like to ask that question. Would she have been better off without him? They were two sides of one coin. So it's very difficult to imagine that we would be talking about either one of them had they not been a pair."