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Loving Frank is a work of fiction based on events relating to the love affair of a brilliant, controversial architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, and one of his clients, Mamah Borthwick Cheney. Mamah, along with her husband Edwin Cheney, commissioned Wright in 1903 to design a house for their family on East Avenue in Oak Park, Illinois. This book portrays the period 1907 to 1914, during which the Wright/Cheney affair flourished. by the author
"Is the purest, most liberating love you've ever known worth giving up your children, your faithful spouse, your friends – your life as you know it? For Martha "Mamah" Borthwick Cheney and her lover, architect Frank Lloyd Wright, the answer was yes."
Who was Mamah Cheney?
Mamah Borthwick Cheney was born in Boone, Iowa in 1869, just four years after the American Civil War ended. Mamah, born Martha, was no woman of the times, as it were—educated at the University of Michigan, she ultimately took a job as a librarian in nearby Port Huron. She spoke several languages, earned a master’s degree in language studies and didn’t marry until she was 30, to Oak Park’s Edwin Cheney, an electrical engineer. They eventually had two children, John and Martha, and Mamah became involved in the community, and through a social club met Catherine Wright. This chance meeting led to the Cheneys' commissioning of Catherine’s husband, Frank Lloyd Wright, to construct them a home.
Frank and Mamah soon began an affair. Both unhappily married and excited by one another, they fled Oak Park, left their spouses and children, for Europe, where they stayed in Italy for a year. Wright’s career took a massive hit, and income was low. The first thing he did was to retreat to his family homestead and build fortress for Mrs. Cheney and himself, (Taliesin - Welsh for "shining brow") On August 15, 1914, Frank Lloyd Wright was overseeing work on Chicago’s Midway Gardens, while Mamah Cheney was in their Taliesin home with her two children, two of Wright’s associates and a father and son, the father another of Wright’s colleagues. After a quarrel with Julian Carlton, one of the home’s workers, Carlton set fire to the complex, and as each tried to escape the blaze, he murdered them, one by one, with an axe. "Death in a Prairie House," published earlier this year, is a captivating look at the Taliesin massacre by William R. Drennan.Wright himself was so overwhelmed that it took him ten years to recover his confidence and return to more stable existence. He remarried in 1922 to Mariam Noel, 
who was his second wife.He paid tribute to Mrs. Cheney, his greatest love, the one for whom he had thrown away a normal career, by building her the simplest grave. Wright built Taliesin Two on the ashes of Taliesin One and developed even further his defensive style. Tragedy followed tragedy. Taliesin Two was burned, and during the fire neighbors not only helped douse the flames, but helped themselves to some of Wright's oriental art as well. Brief biography of Frank Lloyd Wright