Green Lights & Beautiful Wrecks: A Journey into Fitzgerald's World

I met him too young and under fluorescent lighting. We were assigned a task: present a book you loved. Cue chaos. Most people repurposed something from their syllabus or trauma. One boy did Of Mice and Men for the third time. But then, she arrived. The mature student. Twenty-one, with a Louise Brooks bob and eyeliner sharp enough to slice through my teenage disaffection. She brought in Gatsby like it was a calling card – a slim, green Penguin edition, handled reverently. She said, 'This is the most perfectly written book I’ve ever read.'

I fell in love on the spot. With the book, yes – but also with her, her aesthetic, her commitment to literature as performance art. I wanted whatever she had: mystery, eyeliner, literary references. And so began my Fitzgerald phase, which, like most of his characters , I’ve never fully grown out of, and in this Chapter’s bookstore, we still believe in the green light.

The Green Light of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby

Reading The Great Gatsby felt like being handed the keys to a secret club. Not Gatsby’s parties or Daisy’s dock or the careless wreckage of the Buchanans – but the language. The shimmer and melancholy of it. The way Fitzgerald manages to make beauty feel like grief’s glamorous cousin.

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”  That’s a tattoo and a nervous breakdown in one sentence.

I didn’t understand the novel fully, of course, not then. But I knew what the green light meant. Even as a teenage romantic with a tragic fringe, I knew what it was to long for something that felt both utterly yours and forever unreachable. I recognised the glamour of self-invention. The heartbreak of not being seen, even while hosting the party.

Tender Is the Night: A Darker Side of Fitzgerald’s Genius

Years later, I found Tender Is the Night, and fell in love all over again, only this time, with bruises. If Gatsby is champagne and shimmer, Tender is gin and regret. It’s a book that smells like faded perfume and something rotting under the roses.

“Actually, that’s my secret – I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are.” That line hit me like a velvet brick.

Dick Diver (what a name) is one of those men you fall for against your better judgement, and Nicole is both muse and martyr, Zelda-adjacent, fragile and dazzling and breaking apart in slow motion. It’s beautiful. It’s terrible. It’s exactly the kind of literary trainwreck I live for.

A Literary Fever Dream: The Legacy of 1925

There’s something deeply indulgent about loving Fitzgerald. It’s like drinking champagne from a chipped teacup, too much, too soon, and still utterly worth it. But it’s not the parties or the pearls I care about. It’s the ache. The longing. The green light.That’s the secret of it all. Not wealth. Not beauty. But yearning dressed in its finest clothes, but here’s the thing no one tells you about The Great Gatsby: it wasn’t alone.

1925 was a literary fever dream, darling. A glittering, gasping year where modernism got tipsy on ambition, and everyone published something either devastating or dazzling often both. You want a secret club? 1925 wasn’t a year. It was a syllabus for the soul.

The Cultural Impact of 1925: From Woolf to Kafka

That same spring Gatsby was brooding over Daisy’s dock and casually inventing the American novel, Virginia Woolf dropped Mrs. Dalloway like a martini in the middle of literary London. One day in the life of a woman buying flowers – but somehow also time, trauma, the city, the body, and the sheer, furious ache of being alive. Clarissa said she would buy the flowers herself, and we’ve all been trying to recover ever since.

I read Mrs. Dalloway with that very specific kind of reverence reserved for books that seem to know more about your inner life than your therapist. It didn’t feel like a novel. It felt like an atmosphere. Like walking into a room where someone is about to break your heart very quietly.

While Woolf was busy time-travelling through human consciousness, Franz Kafka, already dead, of course, because Kafka never does things the easy way, had The Trial published posthumously. Which feels very on-brand. A man wakes up to find himself arrested by a system that won’t explain itself.

Tell me that’s not the template for literally everything that’s ever happened at the Department of Social Protection.

Fitzgerald and Beyond: The Books That Stay With Us

Basically, 1925 was that moment at the party when all the brilliant, dramatic people show up at once, and you’re standing in the kitchen holding a flat gin and tonic thinking, “God, I wish I were fictional.”

But maybe that’s the real magic. These books, these broken characters, these wildly ambitious sentences, they make us want to live louder. Sadder. Stranger. Better dressed. They give us language for things we haven’t yet lived through, and then they stay with us while we do.

So yes, I still dress for Fitzgerald. But I also light a candle for Woolf, flirt with Kafka, roll my eyes at Hemingway, and keep a copy of Mrs. Dalloway beside my bed like a secret.

1925 wasn’t just a year. It was an aesthetic. A breakdown. A syllabus. A soft place to land.

If you’re looking for your own copy of The Great Gatsby, we offer F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (2016, Paperback), available at our bookstore, where secondhand books and literary classics live on in the hands of new readers.