Love and Ruin: Another Mrs. Hemingway

In May, when Paula McLain appeared with Charles Frazier to be interviewed by Ann Patchett at Nashville Public Library's Salon @615, she said that after writing Paris Wife, the story of Hemingway's first wife Hadley, she hadn't planned to write about any of the other Hemingway women. In a dream though, she saw a woman she recognized from her earlier research as Martha Gellhorn, the fiercely independent journalist who became wife number three. The story would not let her go.

Taking available facts and imagining the missing lives of historical figures is nothing new for McLain. After Paris Wife, she wrote the novel Circling the Sun, based on the life of female aviator and adventurer Beryl Markham, a missing piece of the puzzle in Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa.

In this latest novel, McLain introduces readers to a young woman, an aspiring writer, who meets Hemingway, already famous, during a visit to Key West with her mother. When he heads to Spain to cover the civil war there, she gets a commission from Collier's to do the same. While there, his mentoring, almost fatherly attitude toward her transforms into a love affair.

The story follows them as they build a home together in Cuba and travel together--often with his sons--while waiting out his contentious divorce from second wife Pauline. Hemingway's patterns of serial marriage are no surprise to most readers familiar with the novelist, but Marty Gellhorn is something of a surprise. She stands out as the only wife who ever left Ernest. The story reveals their ups and downs, resulting in part from his drinking and from his resentment of her independent insistence in having a life and career of her own.

Marty has to deal with critics' refusal to take her writing at face value. Instead, they persist in comparing her writing to Hemingways' and focusing on their relationship, implying that he has opened doors for her. As he is basking in his best successes, she continues trying to find her own voice in her fiction while covering war in some of the most dangerous parts of the world.

Even though their divorce and his remarriage aren't news to anyone even remotely familiar with Hemingway, some may be surprised to learn in the afterword that Gellhorn continued to write, covering war zones into her eighties. McLain gets into the mind of a unique character, showing her as much more than a footnote to a bigger literary life.

Love and Ruin: Another Mrs. Hemingway