She thinks they are alone until she turns and sees another woman there, a woman with “a glint silver-blond bob and the strong, self-possessed posture of a Modigliani” who she knew to be Martha Gellhorn. In this dream, she is in a boat with Hemingway, magnetic as ever. (When it was suggested that the artwork, which is strongly reminiscent of an iconic scene in The Notebook, might be a clever bit of Sparks-associative-marketing for the airport crowd, McLain denies she’s read the book or seen the movie, but is all for some “subliminal” marketing). It’s a story she tells in her author’s letter, one that also informs the book’s cover. She wrote another book – historical fiction again – based on the life of legendary aviatrix Beryl Markham, Circling The Sun, which was named a Best Book of 2015 by NPR. Not because she’d fallen out of Hemingway’s thrall by any means, but because she didn’t want to be “that” writer who fixated on one particular seam of inspiration. Toklas.”įour million copies of The Paris Wife later, her life well and truly changed, McLain thought she was done with the pioneer of modernism and his circle. “I was inside her skull, looking out her eyeballs, and I just happened to be in Gertrude Stein’s salon having tea with Alice B. “It was like I was an actress and was the role of my life,” recalls McLain, who, tall and elegant in wide-legged pants and leopard-print heels, could pass for a studio head or big-deal showrunner, if not quite a thespian herself. Something a bit like “voodoo magic” took over, and suddenly, she was writing historical fiction. Scott Fitzgerald woman, because he, in McLain’s words, “was prettier and wrote better sentences.”īut then, well into a career as a poet and memoirist, she reread A Moveable Feast and instantly became obsessed with Hadley Richardson, Hemingway’s first wife and the one he never quite got over. She’d read his works, “greats” such as For Whom The Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea, in college and been unmoved, and anyway, she was more of an F. The 53-year-old, you see, never intended to write even one novel about the lionized American writer, let alone two.

“But he really has, and my relationship with him is this thing to navigate.”

“If you had told me at 20, or even 30, that Ernest Hemingway would change my life, I’d have said you were ridiculous,” McLain says emphatically over an Americano at a Toronto cafe. Both are equally complicated, tempestuous and passionate entanglements. That’s not a typo: For just as much as this is a tale about Martha Gellhorn, pioneering war correspondent and third wife of Ernest Hemingway, it’s also a story of Paula McLain, bestselling author and unwitting medium to Ernest Hemingway. There is a double double bind at the heart of Paula McLain’s new novel, Love and Ruin (Bond Street Books).

Love and ruin paula mclain