The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
N.Y. Times bestselling author speaks at library’s annual lunch
New York Times bestselling author Paula McLain was the featured speaker at the Friends of the Amherst Public Library’s 14th annual authors luncheon on Oct. 18 at the Heritage Presbyterian Church in Amherst.
McLain is the author of “The Paris Wife” and “Love and Ruin,” both of which tell the stories of Ernest Hemingway’s wives from their points of view.
“The Paris Wife” is a New York Times bestselling novel and is printed in 34 languages with over 1.5 million copies sold.
McLain said after 20 years of unread publications, she discovered the need to write about Hemingway’s first wife Hadley Richardson when reviewing Hemingway’s memoir “A Movable Feast” for a memoir class she was teaching in 2008.
She said she went to the Cleveland Public Library to read biographies on Richardson’s life and said she knew instantly that she wanted to write “‘A Movable Feast’ from Hadley’s perspective.”
“This extraordinary thing happened,” McLain said. “I just felt like I had unleashed a genie from a bottle, like here was this woman who had actually lived. She had an extraordinary story to tell, and maybe I could tell it for her.”
McLain wrote the book in seven months after reading thousands of pages of love letters between Richardson and Hemingway, as well as novels and biographies of the two.
“I thought I was a fraud,” she said.
“I’m not a researcher. I’m not a scholar.”
Still, McLain said she found herself needing to unearth an important and seemingly forgotten woman in history.
“Hemingway was such a big person,” she said. “He was the size of the moon and here is a woman whose name I really never heard of before.”
“Love and Ruin” was published seven years later in May 2018 and tells the story of Hemingway’s third wife Martha Gellhorn, one of the most renowned journalists of the 20th century whom McLain described as “scrappy” and “high-spirited.”
“She held onto her own conscience and convictions, her own destiny to be a writer, to be her own woman while being married to one of the most celebrated writers of all time,” McLain said.
McLain even spent time in Gellhorn and Hemingway’s house in Cuba, sifting through thousands of documents and photographs for four days in their kitchen.
“It’s been preserved as if it were a mosquito trapped in amber,” McLain said. “It’s all there.”
Ultimately, McLain said she finds power in retelling stories for other generations to hear.
“It feels like a feminist act to find these littleknown women from history, to shine a light on their experience, to bring them out of the shadows, where, for whatever reason, (these women) have been eclipsed or marginalized or forgotten or mis-remembered and then to tell their story,” McLain said.