The Paris Wife

Oh, Hadley. I knew you were in trouble when you and Hem called each other the same pet name, blurring and eliminating the boundaries between the two of you. Not. Cool.

Hadley Richardson is a lonely woman of 29, freshly freed from nursing her mother in her last illness, when she meets 21-year-old Ernest Hemingway in a Chicago boardinghouse. Hadley doesn't yet know what she wants from life, and she is steamrollered by the force and might of Hem's vigor and charisma to the point of falling for him, marrying him, and moving to Paris. McLain has clearly done her homework, gathering material from countless letters, as well as from Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, but she writes with enough skill that the seams don't show. Hadley and Hem are show more engulfed by 1920s Paris, with its heady mix of authors, poets, painters and personalities - and while the couple is poor, life is magical, for a time. Difficulties seem to begin with the double-punch of Hadley losing all of Hem's manuscripts on a train, and then becoming pregnant, and this reader went from admiring Hemingway as a man to thinking -- "My, what a self-absorbed jerk." Hem has an eye for the ladies, although he loves his wife; eventually, though, things fall apart when Hadley's dear friend becomes the object of his desire. This is a wrenching, lively account of the six-year marriage of a man becoming himself and a woman discovering herself, against the backdrop of Western Europe between the wars. show less

Hadley Richardson meets and falls in love with a young Ernest Hemingway, eventually marrying the aspiring author and moving with him to Paris during the 1920s.

This book seemed like something made specifically for me with a bunch of my favorite things - historical fiction, Paris, Ernest Hemingway, etc. However, it was severely disappointing. Quite frankly, I was not impressed by McLain's writing style, which I found largely to be lackluster and borderline tedious. Her book is populated with flamboyant people from history (e.g., Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald) and is set around intense events (e.g., running of the bulls at Pamplona), yet hardly anything in the book excites interest at all, being related instead placidly through the dull show more eyes of our protagonist.

This is perhaps my biggest problem with the book - the character of Hadley herself. She is a co-dependent, whiny woman with no interests or friends outside of Ernest's, and the action verb most associated with her is "cried." She cries about everything that takes Ernest away for her even briefly. In possibly the most egregious example of this, Hadley locks herself in their Parisian apartment, drinking and crying herself to sleep because Ernest is on assignment. The woman is in Paris, for goodness's sake, with hundreds of things she could see or do, even for free or cheap*, but she can't manage to extradite herself from her room because her husband is travelling for work. No. I have no patience for this. Even with the limited options available to women in the past, she still had a lot more she could have done with her life than sit around crying every time Ernest is out of her sight. (*Follow-up rant: Hadley is always going on and on about how they are dirt poor, but the Hemingways are always managing to jet off to some European tourist spot for weeks on end without either of them working and yet still paying for their Parisian apartment in addition to their vacation lodgings.)

Seeing through Hadley's eyes, life is pretty boring, even in a bohemian setting during the Roaring Twenties. The first half of the book was very difficult for me to get into, given how much I had come to despise the Hadley character for her lack of anything appealing. It took me more than 2 years to finally finish this book because for that first half, I could barely read more than a couple pages at a time before my disgust and disinterest in Hadley and her dull tale would take over. After more than halfway through reading the book, momentum finally took over (that, and the lack of anything else to read while I was in between library books). This section also contained the more interesting parts of the book - those ones that mimic themes and plot points from Hemingway's own works (particularly The Sun Also Rises and Garden of Eden). Still, I wouldn't describe it as a book that you couldn't put down.

Not sure if I can emphasize enough that a good historical fiction book of this type that focuses on a real person needs to choose a subject that is or does something fascinating and then write about that subject in a compelling way. (The real Hadley may have indeed been a very interesting person who was grossly misrepresented here, in which case I feel quite bad for the poor woman.) This book just didn't have anything moving to hold my attention or allow me to recommend it. There are so many better historical fiction options out there (e.g., Loving Frank, which I can't recommend enough) or frankly, a nonfiction account of the first Mrs. Hemingway is probably equally - or perhaps even more so - interesting to read. show less

The writing in this novel is beautifully vivid. The author is able to evoke a strong sense of the times, places and people she writes about. I found this book incredibly sad. Love doesn't conquer all...it doesn't even conquer much.

There are many reviewers who found Hadley to be weak, but I disagree. She dealt with her marriage in her own way. She took her vows very seriously. She was a product of a critical and sheltered upbringing, moved to a whirlwind world where multiple-partner relationships were the norm. I'm glad she found her way, and found happiness in her life.

If I could live anywhere in the world, it would be Paris, France. If I had a time machine, it would be set for Paris in the 20s. Paris between the World Wars has always fascinated me for the wonderful cast of writers and philosophers that hung out in the cafes, the museums, the French Quarter, the restaurants, and the boulevards.

Good fortune took me to Paris a number of times, and from the first, and every trip after, I read Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast – one of my favorite books. I loved the story of Papa struggling to establish himself as a writer, befriending Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and, of course, the proprietor of the famous bookstore, Shakespeare and show more Company. Ms Beach wrote her own version of all these characters.

The Paris Wife tells the fictionalized account of Hadley Richardson, Hemingway’s first wife. The story from her viewpoint goes into much more detail about the feud which developed between Hem and Gertrude, Hem and Anderson, and finally his break up with Hadley. The acknowledgments offers a list of the sources for her story, including biographies, letters, diaries, and all of Hemingway’s fiction. In a graduate class at Baylor, I read all these things, too, and came to a deeper appreciation for Hemingway as a man as well as a writer. This novel adds to that appreciation.

My impression of Hemingway was that of a drinker, brawler, and womanizer. True, he was always all these things, but McLain’s novel brings into focus another side of Hemingway – father, husband, lover, and friend. The novel puts a soft, feminine touch on Papa’s hard edges.

I especially liked the passages in which Hadley describes some of the great men and women she met. McClain writes, “We’d glimpsed Joyce a few times on the streets of Montparnasse, with his neatly combed hair and rimless glasses and shapeless coat, but we’d never heard him speak. ‘He does speak,’ Lewis [Galantière, writer and friend of Sherwood Anderson] insisted, ‘but only under duress.’ ‘Everyone says Ulysses is great,’ Ernest said. ‘I’ve read a few serialized chapters. It’s not what I’m used to, but you know, something important is happening in it just the same.’” (82) Hemingway recognized the great novel needs to be slowly and carefully consumed to experience all the tastes, smells, sounds, and textures of what many lists called the best novel of the 20th century.

A frequently quoted statement of Hemingway’s also found its way into the novel. He tells Hadley, “I want to write one true sentence. If I can write one sentence -- simple and true, every day, I’ll be satisfied” (81).

One horrific episode, in which Hadley’s character comes out, involves the loss of the briefcase with all of Hemingway’s work. Hadley is in a state of anguish for a long time, but Hemingway seems to take it in stride. Gertrude Stein tells him, “I think your losing everything has been a blessing. You needed to be free. To start over with nothing and make something truly new” (152). Gertrude played an important role in Hemingway’s development as a writer, and only his stubborn pride destroyed their relationship.

McLain has added to the myth, the lore, the beauty, the anguish, and the wonderful time of Paris in the 20s. The absorbing story of a romance, art, writing, and living in a time and place unlike any other, should appeal to all readers interested in the arts of reading and writing. Five stars

--Jim, 9/5/11 show less

The characters in this book were mostly awful, especially Hemmingway himself. He's portrayed as a completely childish buffoon. The writing was fantastic, though, and the story mesmerized me. I couldn't look away.

Well-written, but oh, so sad, this is the story of Ernest Hemingway's first marriage as told by Hadley herself, and I loved her voice. Even knowing it was all going to come to grief, I was rooting for Hadley and Ernest in their early years. I could feel her attraction to his charm and good looks; the yearning for love fed by his attention. And she was "right" for him then. Her unwavering support and encouragement, her willingness to put his needs ahead of her own gave him freedom to write. Together they were "the same guy", and inspired their friends to believe they did marriage like nobody else, that they were "tethered to something higher" that made them indestructible. Hadley was a woman slightly out-of-time, surrounded by early show more feminists, yet clinging to her own more traditional take on marriage and determined not to turn into the kind of woman who ruled the household "with iron fists", like her mother and Ernest's had done. Although she never quite fit in with Hemingway's hard-drinking free-loving crowd, she did make fast friends there, and ultimately sparked more loyalty among them than he did, precisely because true loyalty meant something to her that her platinum plated bastard of a husband could never quite grasp. In the end, she rose above the dual betrayal by Ernest and their friend Pauline, finding the strength to learn who she was and what she could bear. Despite a loss that she would never stop feeling, she made a new life for herself and faded into the background of his, where she became "just the early wife, the Paris wife" of the "most important writer of his generation". show less

I rarely read bestsellers, so I resisted THE PARIS WIFE for several years, until I found it at a library sale for just a buck. Even then it sat on my table for a couple months, unread. Well now I've finally read it and found that it lives up to all the praise it's gotten. Paula McClain has gotten inside the skin of Hemingway's first wife, Hadley Richardson, stolen her voice, and brought her magically to life as she lived it in 1920s Paris. She is in fact a much more sympathetic and likeable character than her self-centered, insecure and often boorish husband. Oh, don't get me wrong - I do love some of Hemingway's work. A FAREWELL TO ARMS is one of my favorite novels. But McClain saw him plain, and nailed it, when she had Hadley notice show more early in the marriage, "The way he was always out for himself, whatever the cost."

Or, years later, when Hadley reflects on Ernest's life -

"He was such an enigma, really - fine and strong and weak and cruel. An incomparable friend and a son of a bitch. In the end, there wasn't one thing about him that was truer than the rest. It was all true."

This is one damn fine book. It deserves its huge success. Bravo, Ms McLain. Very highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less