And just as a side note, Hemingway’s first wife was the protagonist and narrator of McLain’s previous book The Paris Wife.
While there, they fall in love amidst the violence and death and Hemingway eventually divorces his second wife. Because she’s beautiful, and a fellow writer, Hemingway takes an interest in her, inviting Martha to Spain in a few months with some other writers to cover the conflict there. After having strange (and in some cases dangerous) dalliances with married men and strangers alike, she meets Hemingway in a bar in Key West while on a trip with her family. We meet Martha when she’s aimless, relatively young and looking to find her purpose after writing a novel that is quickly forgotten. And even though she goes on to accomplish many impressive things after their divorce (she was an accomplished war correspondent and fiction writer) we only glimpse into this shorter-than-a-decade period in her life.Īuthor Paula McLain photo credit Melanie Acevedo
Isn’t it funny how celebrity can overshadow even the most authentic talent? This book is written in the first person perspective of Martha, and it begins shortly before she meets Ernest, and ends shortly after they break up. Reading Love and Ruin by Paula McLain, a work of fiction based on his third wife, basically cemented the fact that he was a jerk (at least in my opinion), and his macho writing was an accurate representation of how he saw himself in his role as husband, father and famous writer.īut already I’ve started off on the wrong foot, focusing on Hemingway the man when really, this story is about his third wife, and extraordinary writer in her own right, Martha Gellhorn. I studied him in school, and was vaguely aware he had a bunch of marriages and an obvious drinking problem, so I had always thought of his personal life as a bit dark. I’ve always been aware of Ernest Hemingway’s ‘not-so-positive’ reputation.
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