Paula McLain

Author of The Paris Wife

About The Paris Wife

Set during a remarkable time, the same period as Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast and The Sun Also Rises, Paula McLain's The Paris Wife captures the voice and heart of Hadley Hemingway as she struggles with her roles as a woman—wife, lover, muse, friend, and mother—and tries to find her place in the intoxicating and tumultuous world of expatriate artists in Paris in the 20s. A deeply evocative story of ambition and betrayal, The Paris Wife captures a remarkable era —Paris in the 20s—and an extraordinary love affair between two very different personalities: Hemingway and Hadley.

Hadley Richardson is a quiet 28-year-old who has all but given up on love and happiness—until she meets Hemingway in Chicago in 1920, and finds herself captivated by his good looks, intensity, and passionate desire to write. Following a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the pair set sail for Paris, where they are embraced by a lively and volatile group of expatriates that includes Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. The hard-drinking and fast-living café life does not celebrate the traditional notions of family and monogamy that Hadley longs to have in her marrage. As Hadley struggles with jealousy and self-doubt and Ernest wrestles with his burgeoning writing career, they must confront a deception that proved the undoing of one of the most interesting marriages literary history.

Hadley & Ernest Hemingway in Switzerland

Hadley, rather prim and staid, is so clearly the wrong mate for Hemingway—the dashing user of people, literary climber, and philanderer—she is destined to have her heart broken. One can only wonder how the match was ever made in the first place. Hemingway's leading biographer, the late Matthew Bruccoli, who participated in Words & Music on a number of occasions, described Hemingway as a "despicable human being" and his actions with Hadley certainly confirm that opinion. Ms. McLain writes of their relationship as a grand love affair and we can well believe that Hadley was in love with her husband. Readers may be forgiven, however, if they come to the conclusion that Hemingway was only capable of loving himself and that his original attraction to Hadley may have been that of a man, subconsciously—to give him the benefit of the doubt—looking for a meal ticket and a ticket to Paris, where he hoped to further his literary career. Hadley was not wealthy but she had money to get them there and keep a roof over their heads while he wrote. To give Hemingway some credit in the relationship, he apparently forgave Hadley when she lost the only copy of an important manuscript.

The book leaves one wanting to go back and re-read The Moveable Feast and other Hemingway works of the Hadley period.

Ms. McLain has this to say about the novel:

In Ernest Hemingway's introduction to his memoir, A Moveable Feast, he writes, 'If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.' I'm hoping my novel will work to illuminate not just the facts of Ernest and Hadley's years in Paris, but the essence of that time and of their profound connection by weaving both the fully imagined and undeniably real.

For more on Ms. McLain and this engaging work of literature, including an interview of value for developing writers, visit:

http://www.randomhouse.com/rhpg/features/paula_mclain/author/

Praise for The Paris Wife

The heroine of The Paris Wife is Hadley Richardson, the athletic, sturdily built, admittedly unfashionable homebody who married Ernest Hemingway in 1921. They were divorced in 1927. Hadley was, by all accounts including this one, a very fine and decent person, but she was the starter wife of a man who wound up treating her terribly. Had she not married him, no novelist would be telling her story...This is a work of literary tourism that expertly flatters its reader. It invokes an artist-packed Paris where 'nearly anyone might feel like a painter.' It keeps Hadley so trusting and good-hearted that it’s impossible for the reader not to spot trouble, i.e., get smart before she does. And it heats up a blaze of righteous indignation on her behalf.
—New York Times

"This absorbing, illuminating book gives us an intimate view of a sympathetic and perceptive woman, the striving writer she married, the glittering and wounding Paris circle they were part of, and the challenges of trying to preserve love and domesticity in the face of rising celebrity and ruthless ambition."
—Seattle Times