Behind the Story: Loving Frank

Nancy Horan’s debut novel uses fact to create fiction around the life and death of Frank Lloyd Wright’s mistress, Mamah Borthwick Cheney

Just over a year ago, I was in the Scottsdale, Arizona, area for work. As my coworker was driving away from the airport, we kept seeing signs for Taliesin West and Frank Lloyd Wright.

“I didn’t know Frank Lloyd Wright had a house out here,” my coworker remarked. Even though Taliesin West plays no role in Loving Frank, the experience caused this novel to come flooding back to my memory.

Nancy Horan’s debut novel, Loving Frank isn’t a biography, but rather a fictionalized take on Wright’s relationship with Mamah Borthwick Cheney and her eventual murder at Taliesin, the escape he’d built when the couple, both married to other people, left Chicago to be together. While rooted in historical facts, Horan’s novel seeks to give flesh, blood and sinew to the relationship and tell the story many may not know about America’s most famous architect.

Where did the idea for the novel come from?

Horan, who has since gone on to write two more books, both historical fiction, lived in Oak Park, Illinois, for 20-plus years. Home to Frank Lloyd Wright’s home and studio, the Chicago suburb is also well-known for a number of houses the architect designed. Horan noticed that when touring the Wright sites in Oak Park, many guides mentioned Mamah or the affair, but rarely provided any insight about her as a person. “What little I learned about her piqued my interest, though,” Horan remarked in an interview with BookBrowse. “She was a highly educated woman, a wife and mother of young children at the time of her affair, a feminist. Who was she, and why did she risk so much?” Reading biographies of Wright only served to intrigue Horan more, so she started to research Mamah and felt compelled to write her story, albeit a fictionalized take since many details of the relationship between Wright and Mamah are unknown.

How long did it take to research and write Loving Frank?

Horan spent seven years working on the novel. She actually started the book in 1999 and focused on four separate points of view. Two years later, she decided to tell the story from Mamah’s perspective. “When I decided to write from Mamah's perspective, the research became more focused,” Horan commented. “There was limited material. I had learned from Wright bios that no correspondence remained of Mamah Borthwick Cheney. So I went to original and secondary sources of information, reading newspaper clips from 1900 to 1914 and scholars' works on Wright, as well as his own writings” (BookBrowse).

Was it difficult to create a fictionalized version of real people and events?

Horan said in a 2017 interview with Book Reporter that even though she was writing fiction, she chose to “hew closely to historical information” (Book Reporter). There were great gaps in that information, though, and difficult real-life decisions Horan had to wrestle with, like Mamah’s very real decision to leave behind her husband and children to live with Wright. “At first, I had to overcome my own discomfort with Mamah’s choices,” Horan said in the Book Reporter interview. “Once I decided to tell the story from the point of view of a woman who was unfaithful to her husband and who left her children, I tried to present Mamah’s line of reasoning, as I imagined it, without judgment.”

Is Mamah’s fate in Loving Frank based in fact?

Though fictionalized, the account of Mamah’s death at Taliesin is indeed based in truth. In August 1914, while Wright was in Chicago for work, an employee at the home attacked Mamah and her two children with an ax before dousing the home in gasoline and setting it on fire. Other employees ran a half mile to a neighbor’s house to call for help. In the end, Mamah, her two children, three employees and a 13-year-old boy died in the violence and subsequent fire. The employee, Julian Carleton, was found hiding inside the home’s basement furnace and later died from self-inflicted injuries. Read more.

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