The Paris Wife

Critical praise

"The Paris Wife is mesmerizing. Hadley Hemingway’s voice, lean and lyrical, kept me in my seat, unable to take my eyes and ears away from these young lovers. Paula McLain is a first-rate writer who creates a world you don’t want to leave. I loved this book."

— Nancy Horan, New York Times bestselling author of Loving Frank

"After nearly a century, there is a reason that the Lost Generation and Paris in the 1920’s still fascinate. It was a unique intersection of time and place, people and inspiration, romance and intrigue, betrayal and tragedy. The Paris Wife brings that era to life through the eyes of Hadley Richardson Hemingway, who steps out of the shadows as the first wife of Ernest, and into the reader’s mind, as beautiful and as luminous as those extraordinary days in Paris after the Great War."

— Mary Chapin Carpenter, singer and songwriter

"Despite all that has been written about Hemingway by others and by the man himself, the magic of The Paris Wife is that this Hemingway and this Paris, as imagined by Paula McLain, ring so true I felt as if I was eavesdropping on something new. As seen by the sure and steady eye of his first wife, Hadley, here is the spectacle of the man becoming the legend set against the bright jazzed heat of Paris in the 20s. As much about life and how we try and catch it as it is about love even as it vanishes, this is an utterly absorbing novel."

— Sarah Blake, New York Times bestselling author of The Postmistress

"McLain offers a vivid addition to the complex-woman-behind-the-legendary-man genre, bringing Ernest Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley Richardson, to life…The heart of the story --- Ernest and Hadley's relationship --- gets an honest reckoning, most notably the waves of elation and despair that pull them apart."

— Publishers Weekly

PRAISE AND REVIEWS

"McLain has done meticulous research (including reading hundreds of the couple's letters to each other) and transports the reader to a different place and time, painting a compelling portrait of the relationship as seen through Hadley's eyes. This well-written look at the early adult life of a tortured literary genius is fascinating and will keep readers turning the pages to the very end."
—Post & Courier

"Exquisitely evocative ... This absorbing, illuminating book gives us an intimate view of a sympathetic and perceptive woman, the striving writer she married, the glittering and wounding Paris circle they were part of, and the challenges of trying to preserve love and domesticity in the face of rising celebrity and ruthless ambition. Though she draws faithfully from historical resources (including the couple's letters to one another), McLain reinvents the story of Hadley and Ernest's romance with the lucid grace of a practiced poet."
—Seattle Times

"A sweet love story with surprising emotional impact ... McLain recreates the well-trodden territory of the Lost Generation with more skill and effect than anything written in recent years. Her Hadley Richardson lived with her husband as an everywoman who was very much of her time, and very comfortable there. Her pain is visceral yet so delicately written that her perceptions are trusted and her reactions felt deeply. If the real first Mrs. Hemingway was anything like this creation, it is easy to divine how Ernest fell in love."
—Chicago Sun-Times

"An insightful, bittersweet novel ... emotionally authentic and well-rooted in its time."
—Denver Post

"Paula McLain's emotionally revealing story celebrates both an iconic American writer and a woman of great grace and dignity. THE PARIS WIFE deserves every accolade bestowed upon it."
—Mobile Register

"Paula McLain's fictional account of Hemingway's first marriage beautifully captures the sense of despair and faint hope that pervaded the era and their marriage."
—Associated Press

"Women and book groups are going to eat up this novel ... The evocative PARIS WIFE made me return to The Sun Also Rises and Hemingway's own remembrance of Paris in the '20s, A Moveable Feast. I thank McLain for those renewed reading pleasures and for her own insights into a complicated literary figure and the sweet first wife he loved, then let go."
—USA Today

"McLain's novel not only gives Hadley a voice, but one that seems authentic and admirable. There's a quiet dignity to the woman often dismissed as 'the early wife, the Paris wife.' ... [McLain] makes a compelling case that Hadley was a crucial (and long-lasting) influence on Hemingway's writing life: a partner as well as a cheerleader. She also revisits, with remarkable detail, a singular era in history, one that would produce some of the greatest literary works of the 20th century."
—Newsday

"THE PARIS WIFE creates the kind of out-of-body reading experience that dedicated book lovers yearn for, nearly as good as reading Hemingway for the first time—and it doesn't get much better than that."
—Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"If you're looking for a poignant romance that offers both substance and sustenance, I have a book for you. ... Drawing from biographies, love letters, and Hemingway's novels, McLain blends fact and fiction to explore the inner workings of the courtship and marriage of Hemingway and the lovely, reclusive woman who fell passionately in love with him. Told largely in Hadley's voice, this luscious narrative describes two people drawn together by painful early histories, and eager to sample life's richness. ... For those of us who think we already know everything about 'Papa' Hemingway, THE PARIS WIFE gives us the chance to learn more about his youthful character."
—Boston Globe

"Hadley Richardson comes into her own in Paula McLain's stylish new novel."
—New York Times Book Review

"[THE PARIS WIFE] is an imaginative homage to Hadley Richardson Hemingway, whose quiet support helped her young husband become a writer, and it gives readers a chance to see the person Hemingway aspired to be before fame turned him into something else. ... Part of McLain's accomplishment in this origin story is to make us look again at the Paris husband behind the Paris wife; not at the mythical swaggering Papa, but at the young, death-consumed writer who became a poet of death, who invented a new language to bring it to life, and whose brute emotional literary power will not be dismissed."
—Washington Post

"Paula McLain's vivid, clear-voiced novel is a conjecture, an act of imaginary autobiography on the part of the author. Yet her biographical and geographical research is so deep, and her empathy for the real Hadley Richardson so forthright (without being intrusively femme partisan), that the account reads as very real indeed. ... By making the ordinary come to life, McLain has written a beautiful portrait of being in Paris in the glittering 1920s—as a wife and one's own woman."
—Entertainment Weekly (A–)

"Here comes Paula McLain's marvelous new novel THE PARIS WIFE, which explores those absinthe-soaked days through the eyes of Hemingway's first wife, Hadley Richardson."
—Marie Claire

"McLain's vivid account of the couple's love affair and expat adventures—including absinthe-fueled nights with the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald—will leave you feeling sad yet dazzled."
—PARADE

"In THE PARIS WIFE, McLain has taken their love story, partially told by Hemingway himself in A Moveable Feast, and fashioned a novel that's impossible to resist. It's all here, and it all feels real."
—People

"Told in the voice of Ernest Hemingway's first wife, THE PARIS WIFE by Paula McLain is a richly imagined portrait of bohemian 1920s Paris, and of American literature's original bad boy."
—Town & Country

"You don't have to be up on your Hemingway to get lost in this story and the free-wheeling, wine-soaked atmosphere of 1920s Paris."
—Redbook

"In this new novel, which reimagines Richardson and Hemingway's early days as a couple in 1920s Paris, Paula McLain has given the shy, aspiring pianist a rich, likeable persona. ... Hard to put down."
—The Week

The Observer - review

Paula McLain's novel gives Ernest Hemingway's Paris years an affectingly romantic cast

A few years back, the novelist Curtis Sittenfeld had the bright idea of fictionalising the life of Laura Bush. American Wife told the story of one Alice Blackwell, the gentle, liberal first lady of a wealthy, vulgar and dim-witted president. It was a clever sidelong way of peeking into the Bush administration, and prefigured both the name and modus operandi of The Paris Wife, a novelisation of Ernest Hemingway's first marriage from the point of view of his quiet and good-tempered spouse.

Like George Bush, Hemingway has over the years degenerated into a crude caricature of himself: "Papa", the drink-sodden bully who roamed the world with a shotgun in one hand and a whiskey in the other. By returning to the heady Paris interlude that began his career, Paula McLain retrieves a more appealing figure: a suitable romantic hero, in fact, for what turns out to be a pleasantly affecting love story.

Hadley Richardson (McLain has elected to keep her characters' real names) is 28 when she first meets the glamorous young war hero at a party. Wholesome, a little old-fashioned – "I don't know any jazz, so I'm playing Rachmaninoff" – she's resigned to a spinsterish existence, living unmarried and unemployed in the upper floor of her sister's house. Despite the cobwebs she is, as Ernest quickly spots, "a good clear sort", and so he marries her and whisks her from St Louis to the whirlwind of 1920s Paris, where the likes of Ezra Pound, F Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein can be found thronging every boulevard.

The period and setting are hardly untrodden territory for novelists and biographers alike, and McLain owes a great debt, as she cheerfully admits, to A Moveable Feast, Hemingway's own posthumously published memoir of his Paris years. The difference between the two is that the action here is largely seen through Hadley's eyes; the domestic takes precedent and there is more emotion and exposition than Papa would permit.

Even stripped to the core, the story possesses a classically tragic arc, and it's not hard to see its appeal to a novelist bent on refleshing bare bones. Ernest and Hadley – Tatie, as they call each other – begin their expat life in a flush of love. He writes, she cooks, and they drink away the evenings "until we were beautifully blurred and happy to be there together". The first ripple of disharmony comes when Hadley decides to bring all Ernest's manuscripts – three years of work, copies included – with her in a valise to a rendezvous in Switzerland. Of course the case is lost, and the disaster exposes a fault line between the pair that's only further strained when Hadley discovers she's pregnant.

Full of mistrust after these inadvertent betrayals, Ernest is ripe for the seductive advances of Pauline Pfeiffer, a "pretty otter" of a woman who will eventually become Mrs Hemingway number two. McLain, who has done an excellent job of assuring the reader of Hadley's saintly qualities, clearly doesn't have much time for this snake in Dior, who accompanies the Hemingways on holiday on the proviso that she takes the afternoon shift in the marital bed.

Hadley is a deeply touching character, dignified even as she loses almost everything she's loved, and making her goodness both convincing and interesting is an impressive feat. Indeed, this book is a more risky affair than its sometimes sugary surface betrays. Taking up the Hemingway story inevitably means comparisons with Papa himself, and McLain courageously draws fire by including interludes written from his perspective: hard-bitten monologues with such lines as "You might as well bring yourself down and make yourself stinking sick with all you do because this is the only world there is." It's not exactly up there with John Cheever's classic parody, but it certainly does the job.

An appealing companion volume to A Moveable Feast, then, but once it's finished, turn back to the original, with its cool, impressionistic prose. It can hardly be said that the least interesting thing about Hemingway is the way he lived his life, but let's not forget that it's his writing that endures.

The New York Times - review

A First Wife Can Be So Stolid and Clueless and Plain and Pregnant

By JANET MASLIN

The strikingly attractive cover of “The Paris Wife” depicts a glamorous, poised-looking woman perched in a Paris cafe. She wears a belted, tailored dress reminiscent of the late 1940s or early 1950s. Her face cannot be seen, but her posture radiates confidence and freedom. The picture is interesting because it has absolutely nothing to do with the book it is selling.

The heroine of “The Paris Wife” is Hadley Richardson, the athletic, sturdily built, admittedly unfashionable homebody who married Ernest Hemingway in 1921. They were divorced in 1927. Hadley was, by all accounts including this one, a very fine and decent person, but she was the starter wife of a man who wound up treating her terribly. Had she not married him, no novelist would be telling her story.

But Paula McLain has built “The Paris Wife” around Hadley. Or at least she has planted Hadley in the midst of a lot of famous, ambitious people. The advantage to this technique is that it allows the reader to rub shoulders and bend elbows with celebrated literary types: the stay-at-home way of feeling like the soigné figure on the book cover. The drawback is that Ms. McLain’s Hadley, when not in big-league company that overshadows her, isn’t a subtly drawn character. She’s thick, and not just in physique. She’s slow on the uptake, and she can be a stodgy bore.

“Why couldn’t I be happy?” she asks herself at the start of the novel. “And just what was happiness anyway?” She has just met the younger Hemingway at a party in Chicago in 1920; she herself wasn’t all that young during their courtship. “I was 29, feeling almost obsolete, but Ernest was 21 and white hot with life,” she confides. “What was I thinking?” (Come on. We know what she was thinking.) And: “He was a light-footed lad on a Grecian urn chasing truth and beauty. Where did I fit in exactly?”

“The Paris Wife” raises fewer questions about Hadley’s thinking than it does about Ms. McLain’s. This novel draws heavily on research, but it does so in confounding ways. When Hadley describes writing a letter to her sweetheart, for instance, is the book paraphrasing a real letter? Let’s hope so, because if not, she is just being dull. “I made my reply last all day, putting things down as they happened,” Hadley says, “wanting to be sure he could picture me moving from room to room, practicing the piano, sitting down to a perfect cup of ginger tea with my friend Alice Hunt, watching our gardener prune the rosebushes and swaddle them in burlap for winter.”

Hadley’s real voice, at least as quoted in Hemingway’s Paris memoir, “A Moveable Feast,” isn’t dissimilar to Ms. McLain’s version. But in the context of his writing she sounds much livelier. Historically, Hemingway used his first wife as a sounding board as he framed his own ideas. He also invoked her with wit, selectivity and care.

The first third of the “The Paris Wife” is its most cliché-ridden. (“Did you ever think it could be like this?” “I can do anything if I have you with me.”) And it moves ploddingly. (“Grace had me pinned in the parlor, talking about the superiority of European lace, while Dr. Hemingway hovered with a plate of cheeses and beets he’d preserved himself, from his garden in Walloon Lake.”) For the reader’s purposes, these two can’t get to Paris fast enough. They go there from Chicago after the playwright Sherwood Anderson recommends the change of scenery. “Everything’s interesting and everyone has something to contribute,” he says. “Paris, Hem. Give it some thought.”

Once the couple gets to Paris, the book’s real name dropping begins. Along come Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and James Joyce. And their great works become topics of stilted banter. Here is Ms. McLain’s version of lifelike chat: “ ‘Everyone says “Ulysses” is great,’ Ernest said. ‘I’ve read a few serialized chapters. It’s not what I’m used to, but you know, something important is happening in it just the same.’ ” As for Hadley, she doesn’t add much to these conversations, but she replays them for the reader. And she is very polite: “I spooned up my delicious soup as quietly as a mouse.” “The Paris Wife” turns into a bizarre pastiche when Ms. McLain begins borrowing and repurposing familiar voices. Hadley walks by the Île St.-Louis, goes down to the Seine, watches the fishermen and eats fried goujon — just as Hemingway did in his essay “People of the Seine.” Zelda Fitzgerald paraphrases Daisy Buchanan’s dialogue from “The Great Gatsby.” The noisy, real-life models for characters in “The Sun Also Rises” suddenly drop into the story en masse. And Hadley learns to talk more like her husband. She begins using simple declarative sentences. In the end he says Hadley is “everything good and straight and fine and true.” She says he is “fine and strong and weak and cruel.”