Odyssey of a Wandering Mind: The Strange Tale of Sara Mayfield, Author

This mesmerizing account by poet Horne (Tell the World You’re a Wildflower) skillfully pieces together the disjointed life of biographer Sara Mayfield (1905–1979). Mayfield was raised in Montgomery, Alabama’s upper crust alongside friends Zelda Sayre (later Fitzgerald) and actress Tallulah Bankhead. Mayfield lived a privileged and variegated life (among other pursuits, she invented a new plastic and founded an “unemployment colony” that paid men to clear timber), but in her middle age she began to experience “delusional episodes,” leading her family to commit her to a psychiatric facility in 1948. Upon her release 17 years later, she published biographies of the Fitzgeralds and H.L. Mencken, followed by a novel imagining a relationship between Leonardo da Vinci and the model for the Mona Lisa. Horne excels at balancing the diverse phases of Mayfield’s complicated life and offers a sensitive appraisal of her time as a psychiatric patient, suggesting that encephalitis might have caused her symptoms and that her family’s decision to commit her likely stemmed from a mixture of genuine concern and sexist assumptions that her myriad business pursuits were signs of mental disorder. Well-researched and compassionately written, this beguiling tale of madness and literature shines. (Jan.)