On February 12, 1932, Zelda Fitzgerald—born Zelda Sayre—voluntarily entered Dr. Phipps's clinic at the Johns Hopkins psychiatric hospital in Baltimore. Save the Waltz for Me, her only published novel, is the result of the recuperative therapy prescribed to the author: two hours of writing a day.

Written over a period of approximately four weeks, this autobiographical novel tells the story of a woman, Alabama Beggs—Zelda's alter ego—permanently out of step with her times. Her southern childhood spent in "the rancid and stigmatized bosom of black wet nurses," her quest to find a husband among hundreds of soldiers enlisting for World War I, a hectic married life in New York, her arrival in Europe, and the protagonist's desperate search to find meaning in her life through classical dance are some of the themes developed to the point of madness.

“Zelda Sayre's writing is full of successes, mainly due to the way she constructs her scenes; dreamlike passages populated by elements of 19th-century Impressionist art, taxonomic references to the plant kingdom, and the excessive use of metaphors and allegorical representations, which merely reflect her boundless imagination, full of symbolic and lyrical resources, and which endow the reading with a highly stimulating intellectual intensity.”