Best-Seller Proposes Feminist Thesis
How does it feel to have your novel, about Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, bid on by six major publishing houses? According to Cleveland author Paula McLain, who had already written a novel, a memoir and two books of poetry but never experienced success like this, she felt, “It was the most exciting moment of my professional life, and also just felt like the planets aligning.”
Her new work “The Paris Wife: A Novel,” enters the NY Times best-sellers list at #9 this week. The book is based on the early writing life of Ernest Hemingway and his first wife (of four), Hadley Richardson, a period well documented in numerous biographies, letters, and Hemingway’s own books, which McLain used to structure her novel. “I followed the historical record as a scaffolding, a kind of skeleton, if you will.”
Possibly the most outrageous thesis one can draw from McLain’s thoroughly researched and meticulously structured and fictionalized account of Ernest Hemingway’s early years in Paris, teaching himself to write while working on his sketches In Our Time, and first novel The Sun Also Rises, is that Hemingway’s sparse, terse, condensed writing style, which influenced entire generations of subsequent writers, actually came from his first wife Hadley Richardson, to whom McLain ascribes this groundbreaking voice and writing style.
Can this feminist message be what McLain is getting at? “That’s exactly what I’m saying… And of course, the voice in his head, the deepest, purest, most intimate, most personal voice is her voice.”
“It’s really a woman’s story, if you think of ”A Moveable Feast,” from Hadley’s point of view, his first wife,” says McLain.
Watch this revealing and provocative exclusive Cool Cleveland video interview with Paula McLain as she talks about how her own difficult childhood growing up in foster care gave her some perspective on the challenging circumstances of Ernest and Hadley’s early years.