The Paris Wife

"This book is told in the first person, in the voice of Hadley. In that way it’s a good complement to Monique Truong’s book, which is told in the voice of the cook. Paula McLain did a good job in terms of historical research, and in fleshing out Hadley’s psychology. I think it is quite close. It’s interesting to cross-reference this book with the two Hemingway books we discussed earlier, because they cover much of the same terrain. McLain has stuck close to those sources and repeats some of Hemingway’s lines, such as the one about writing one true sentence. What is more intensely imagined in this novel is the long drawn-out breakup, with Hemingway slowly drifting away from Hadley and going over to Pauline. That is much more shadowy in A Moveable Feast. There are just a few references to Pauline, and then the apology to Hadley. There isn’t much detail about the breakup itself. But in The Paris Wife you see in vivid detail how Pauline was physically there, with both of them, while the breakup was going on, and how Hadley finally drifted into asking for a divorce. It was very painful, because Pauline insisted during all that time that she was Hadley’s friend as well. I’m persuaded by that imagined sequence, although we will never know exactly what happened, and whether Hemingway was as passive as is suggested in this book. But his unwillingness to make any decision seems right, as well as his strong tie to Hadley up to the very end. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The book is a good corrective to the image Hemingway liked to portray of himself as a supreme writer who knew exactly what he was doing, always on top of things. It is also a good portrait of Hadley, and shows her as lacking in ruthlessness – someone who wouldn’t fight to keep her man at all costs. That is what makes her so attractive to Hemingway to begin with. There were all these different writers in Paris, like Joyce and Pound, so they were aware of what other people were doing. That was a tremendous spur, especially to Hemingway. There was also experimentation in the visual arts. Gertrude Stein, in many ways, was trying to produce in language what Picasso and Matisse were trying to do structurally in painting. Hemingway would also write, and then look at paintings by Cezanne and others. James Mellow, one of Hemingway’s biographers, thinks he was trying to do with words what Cezanne had already done with brush strokes. So I would say that both the practice and the personalities of other writers, and the challenge coming from the art world, combined to produce Hemingway and Stein’s writings."

"I read this while I was writing my debut novel and it was very inspiring because, again, it showed me what biographical fiction could be. It is the story of Ernest Hemingway’s first marriage to Hadley Richardson, set in the dynamic and artistic world of 1920s Paris . It’s also a retelling of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast , told from Hadley’s point of view. It gives voice to a pivotal and yet comparatively silent woman in a classic book, in the tradition of works like Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea . The Paris Wife explores their whirlwind courtship, their immersion in the expat literary scene of Paris and the eventual breakdown of the marriage. And it shows Hadley’s struggles to maintain her identity amid Hemingway’s growing literary fame and infidelities, including the affair with Pauline Pfeiffer, who would become his second wife. McLain captures Hemingway’s charisma, but she also gets his tendencies towards boastfulness and bullying. I didn’t like him at all. That’s true. This novel changed my view of Hemingway. I think my responsibility is to stick as closely as possible to the biographical facts, and kind of colour in the characters’ emotional lives. Occasionally, I take liberties with the chronology, and where there are gaps in the record, I feel free to invent. For example, my latest novel, The Paris Muse , is based on the life of the photographer and artist Dora Maar. She was one of Pablo Picasso ‘s lovers and desperately wanted a child with him, but she was never able to have one. There is no factual information about why she couldn’t conceive, and so I crafted a narrative around this aspect of her life. I don’t create them from nothing. I read everything that’s been written by and about them. It’s total immersion, and a pretty good sense of the character and her voice emerges. In The Paris Wife , Hadley’s struggles to maintain her identity are relatable and easy to empathise with. Emotions don’t change through history. I think that what Hadley felt about her husband cheating on her is no different to what a woman now would feel if their partner were cheating on them."