** spoiler alert ** 
 Given that I knew very little about Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture, let alone his love affairs, this novel had the grueling tasks of both schooling me and entertaining me. 
 A lot of reviewers found Mamah, the narrator, to be selfish for leaving her family to pursue her own happiness. I wholeheartedly disagree. I might venture to say that this was one of the most realistic and heart-crushing portraits of female strength and desire that I've ever read. Flaws and all, you saw all 360 degrees of what it would have been like, in the early 1900's, to find that you chose the wrong path for yourself, in love and in life. 
 Mamah's search for her true self was like digging in the dirt for fossils. With each chisel, it became harder and harder to discern the bone from mere rock, the core of herself from the insignificant details that attached themselves to her. Doesn't everyone wonder if they have a core spirit that, stripped of all details, would reveal their true self or if they're simply a random collection of events and experiences, molded into some semblance of a human being? 
 The ending was completely shocking. Kept me awake well past my bedtime. 
 Would definitely be interesting to pair this with T.C. Boyle's The Women, also about Frank Lloyd Wright's love affairs. 
 Favorite Quotes: 
 She wasn't a superstitious person or particularly religious, but it seemed a kind of proof that they were meant to know each other, that fate had spat them out into the world at the same time, in nearly the same place, by design. 
 You can't keep your children by having no life of your own...They will know. Your own unhappiness will plant the seeds of unhappiness in your children. And they will blame you for it someday. 
 Love is moral even without legal marriage...But marriage is immoral without love. 
 Frank's drive comes from inside himself. Do I want to support him? Yes, of course. He's like all of us - he longs for tenderness...But he has a muse already. Nature. 
 She felt that she did more for her children in holding high above them the womanhood of the mother than by sacrificing it to them.