Book Review: The Paris Wife

Thursday, 02 June 2011 10:33

Looking for inspiration for her second novel, Paula McLain turned to Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. “I was just so swept away by these people, these characters,” Paula told us during a phone interview.

She didn’t know much about Hemingway as a person, but she was interested in his relationship to his first wife, Hadley, and their “wildly romantic” story. In The Paris Wife, Paula decided to tell Hadley’s side of the story to give her a voice. “She could tell us something that we don’t know about Hemingway,” she says.

Story by Lane Nieset

The novel starts with Hadley’s childhood and her early encounters with Hemingway in Chicago. The reader is with Hadley every step of the way and is swept up in the romance that begins.

When Hadley returns to St. Louis in 1920, she and Hemingway began writing letters back and forth, and over the course of 11 months, sent thousands of letters. Paula wanted the book to seem as if one was reading Hadley’s memoir.

When researching the characters and developing her style, she got a sense of Hadley’s voice by reading letters she that showed her sense of her humor and types of phrases she used. “A magical thing can happen when you latch on to a character,” Paula says. “She was instantly magnetic to me, and I believed I understood her.”

Although the author initially thought her book would appear more feminist and would expose Hemingway in a sense, Paula developed more sympathy and compassion for Hemingway and even admires him for some of the same reasons as Hadley. “Even though he goes on to break her heart, he wakes her up,” she explains.

This seems to be the constant theme throughout the novel. The book follows the couple to Paris and Hemingway’s start as a writer, but even though we see the beauty of the city and the dynamic chemistry between the couple, we’re constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Hadley can feel the growing pressure as Hemingway becomes more successful and faces more temptation. She makes many sacrifices for him, and even though they love one another and she puts him and his writing first, their relationship inevitably spirals out of control. Paula says part of what she likes about Hadley is that she’s solid and knows who she is, even in a difficult situation. “Hadley is a woman of a particular generation and even though she’s not like me…I admire her integrity and the way she sticks to her guns.”

Paula says she owes a great debt to A Moveable Feast, which was the bones of her book. She writes a few passages from Hemingway’s point of view to show the influence he was having on the shape of the story. “I had to trust that I had the confidence as a writer to take on [Hemingway’s] voice,” she says. While Paula was on a book tour in St. Louis, Hadley’s family showed up and her nephew said, “That [the book] was just beautiful. Aunt Hadley would’ve liked it.”

This was the type of response Paula was hoping for. As for how passionately she felt about these characters and their stories, she says, “I believe I owe [Hadley and Hemingway] the real people, because they lived.”

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