The Paris Wife by Paula Mclain

A book club recommendation - that means not a book club reading selection, but one of the books we talked about and was recommended by one of the members whose judgement I trust. It is the story of Hadley Richardson Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway's first wife (of four), told in first person. She was a girl from St. Louis who met a dashing young man while visiting in Chicago

She is the one that married him before he was published and became a star. She lived with him in cheap and uncomfortable quarters in Paris while he struggled to find his voice. They were part of the expatriate community of American writers and artists which included F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda, Gertrude Stein, and Sherwood Anderson. It was a mad life. Mclain leaves the impression that Hadley never felt that she quite fit in, although she drank and caroused with them.

The story leaves many questions unaddressed. Why did so many American writers decamp for Paris. For most of them, their lives there were not particularly comfortable. And why did they cluster together almost frantically. Stein, understandably took herself and her partner out of the country. But the implication seems to be that creativity and the United States at the time were incompatible.

Mclain does specifically make the point that the book is fiction, not biography, but she makes these people of legend seem quite real. It leaves me considering reading Hemingway's own book about that period of his life, A Moveable Feast. Partly because I am curious about how when he and a woman Hadley considered her best friend had an affair, a woman who became Hemingway's second wife, they could expect her to simply continue in a bizarre menage a trois.

Interesting book, easy read, and perhaps a small window into the fundamental insanity of the time, place, and personalities.