Last week I was thrilled to meet best-selling author Paula McLain, most known for her three biographical novels—The Paris Wife about Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley Richardson; Circling the Sun about aviator Beryl Markham; and Love and Ruin about Martha Gellhorn, one of the twentieth century’s great war correspondents and Hemingway’s third wife.
“I want to find little known women and shine a light on their lives,"she said, "so you feel you know them and have a better understanding of them and their lives.” By choosing to tell these women’s story in novel form, I think McLain accomplishes that goal by bringing them to life in a way that a strict biography might not. The books are in the “can’t put it down” category.
When I went to her talk, I expected to learn about McLain’s life and books. I didn’t expect that she would be such a dynamic speaker, drawing her audience into her world. She spoke briefly about her childhood, telling us that her mother left when she was four, leaving her and her two sisters to grow up in California’s foster care system. After turning eighteen, she managed to support herself and go to college, eventually getting an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan.
“And I used loans to get it!” she said, laughing “You can imagine what everyone said: Poetry? You paid to study poetry? Nobody buys poetry.”
Well, maybe not nobody, but she knew she wouldn’t make a living with poetry. By that time she was married and divorced with a two-year-old son, and worked several jobs, while also writing a novel. It was published, but didn’t sell well. Still, she knew she couldn’t stop writing—writing was who she was.
Fortunately for McClain, she picked up the book A Moveable Feast, a memoir of Hemingway’s Paris years in the 1920s. Based on his manuscripts and notes, it was published three years after his death. McClain was “entranced” by 1920s Paris when so much was going on in the arts. Still a struggling writer, Hemingway partied, drank, and became friends with literary figures such as such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein.
That’s when McLain got her “big idea” to write about little-known women. Although Hemingway’s wife Hadley was mentioned only twice in A Moveable Feast, McLain wanted to tell the story of those Paris years through her eyes, the years when Hadley was loved and betrayed by Hemingway. Her agent asked her if she could write the book fast. Now remarried and the mother of three children, McLain sat in a Starbucks in Cleveland Heights, OH, and went to Paris in her imagination. She read Hemingway, immersed herself in the period, and took Hadley “out of the shadows.” She also managed to write the book in seven months!
The rest, as they say, is history. The Paris Wife went on to be a best-seller, and McLain went on to write Circling the Son, a book about aviator Beryl Markham. She heard about Markham from a brother-in-law who was reading Markham’s own book, West with the Night. “I was hooked after the first few paragraphs,” McLain said. She told the world about this ground-breaking woman, raised in Kenya, who went from horse training to flying and became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west.
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McLain signed Love and Ruin for me
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Love and Ruin, about Martha Gellhorn, is McLain's most recent book. I just finished it and can only say thank you to McLain for shining a light on this amazing woman. I’m going to talk about Love and Ruin in next week's blog because Martha Gellhorn deserves her own post.
Have you read Paula McLain’s books? Do you have a favorite?
Thanks for this interesting info regarding Paula. I read Circling the Sun and loved it. Now, I'll get her other books as well. Sorry I missed the talk. Still busy for the next week and then life settles down. Appreciate learning more about this author. I'm sharing this on my fb page. B
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing it and for your comment. She is such a friendly person and an incredible speaker, not to mention a great writer
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