Women Behind The Men Month: The Paris Wife by Paula McLain

The Women Behind the Men month concludes with the bestselling The Paris Wife by Paula Mclain.

It is, by all accounts, not easy to deal with the prima-donna ego and keep your own sense of self alive.  Imagine what it was like being married to Ernest Hemingway, the loudest, most braggadocious ego in the room, machismo personified.  Hadley Richardson managed to do that and more, thriving under their marital bonds, becoming an able helpmeet who managed to get Hemingway’s work sold and inspire his heroine in “The Sun also Rises” to boot, winning a dedication from him and thus literary immortality.     She was his wife in those first glorious Paris days, and they hobnobbed with various luminaries until Hadley made the cardinal mistake of losing one of Hemingway’s suitcases at a train station – the one filled with his manuscripts.  Hemingway felt emasculated, their trust was broken, he sought companionship elsewhere, and Hadley and his son Bumby moved away, watching him create his own myth wholecloth, part truly believed macho blandishment, part cover for the vulnerable man whose whole life was dogged by death.  But Hemingway never stopped loving Hadley and Hadley, even as she found comfort in a more sedate marriage with another man, never forgot Ernest. 

The reason why “The Paris Wife” rises head and shoulders above the competition it inspired is simple:  It captures the voices of Hemingway and his bride perfectly, giving us Hadley’s point of view on those halcyon five years of their marriage, of their travels and lives, after Hemingway received his say in his own  ‘A Movable Feast’.  The author also gives credible voice to a cast as wide-ranging as Sarah and Gerald Murphy and Pauline Pfeiffer, the woman for whom Hemingway would eventually leave Hadley.  There’s no need to invent dramatic stories, for their lives were dramatic;  the story is rich enough.

The plot is thoughtful and strongly done; the author wonders what could have saved Hadley and Ernest's love, then answers the question with plaintive truthfulness.  What we have of Hadley in Hemingway’s work matches perfectly with what the author gives us; she’s strong and smart as she ever was in his prose, with an added layer of romantic reflection and feeling.  Hemingway is given far more depth than even he himself dared credit himself with – he’s got sensitivity, vulnerability, two things he refused to give himself in his own writing.  The characters feel real, and hopelessly captured by their patterns of behavior, wrecking and loving each other in the same breath.

The Paris Wife wins this month’s sweepstakes, providing the best all around point of view on a woman whose life was retrieved from the ashes of obscurity by the very skin of her teeth.