What the secretary sawSarah Churchwell
Big Bosses: A Working Girl’s Memoir of the Jazz Age
by Althea McDowell AltemusUniversity of Chicago Press, £10.50, pp. 220
In 1922, writing a facetious review of her husband’s second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, Zelda Fitzgerald made an ironic reference to the fact that Scott Fitzgerald had used sections from her diary in his novel: ‘It seems to me that on one page I recognised a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage…’.
1922 was the same year in which Fitzgerald would later set The Great Gatsby, in part as a tribute to the other great modernist works of that literary annus mirabilis. And it was also the year in which Big Bosses begins: ‘It was 1922, America had been at war, money was tight, work was scarce,’Althea Altemus remarks, launching us into a memoir of her adventures as a professional secretary to the wealthy during the Jazz Age.
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