(By the way, Paula lives in Cleveland, my hometown, and she wrote much of this book in a Starbucks there. But Paula McLain is an excellent storyteller, and I trust her when she portrays a couple who were so right for each other at the time in their lives when they met, and then so wrong for each other a few years later, when both needed to move on. I don’t mean to suggest his early adult experiences explain everything about Hemingway, because personalities and destinies are more complex than that. This was Hemingway’s state of mind at 21 when he met Hadley, who was 28.

He then fell in love with a nurse a few years older than he (Catherine was her incarnation in A Farewell to Arms) who called off their marriage after she fell in love with an Italian officer. I hadn’t realized Hemingway was only 18 (about my son’s age) when he served as an ambulance driver in the war, saw horrific battles, and was seriously wounded. Hemingway (and Jake Barnes, Hemingway’s alter ego in The Sun Also Rises) almost certainly had what we’d call today post-traumatic stress disorder. Despite my initial reservations, The Paris Wife was a good read and helped me see Hemingway and his first novel in a new light.

I had to laugh when a note left by a previous reader fluttered out from between the pages of my library book: “Brett is a low-class whore.”īut this time, I tried to understand who these people were: the post World War I Lost Generation, stunned and alienated after the bloodiest war in history, surrounded by stratospheric, dissipated wealth alongside abject poverty. I half-wished Hemingway would kill off the insufferable former war-time nurse, Lady Brett Ashley, but I knew better. Aimless, self-absorbed people endlessly drinking in European bars and cafes, and then they go to a bullfight. I found The Sun Also Risesjust as tedious as when I read it as a baffled teenager. (I hope you can follow this.) These two books I read while spending a few days in Key West with my family and visiting Hemingway’s former home, now a museum. I read The Paris Wife back-to-back with Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises(which I read years ago) because I thought it would be interesting to see portrayed, in The Paris Wife, the “real” people who were models for Hemingway’s characters in The Sun Also Rises. The author has to work doubly hard for me to wholeheartedly enter her fictional world, because I can’t forget we’re seeing actual events filtered through her idiosyncratic speculations, which could be way off base.

Generally, I don’t like novelized versions of real people’s lives. I was prepared not to like The Paris Wife, Paula McLain’s novel about Ernest Hemingway’s first of four marriages, to Hadley Richardson, written from Hadley’s point of view. I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.

The paris wife hemingway