And part of this future included Hadley Richardson, his first wife, a woman who was his equal in many ways - a risk-taker, adventurer, and big drinker. Paula McLain - in an addictive and mesmerizing debut book - breathes life into their life together in Paris in the 1920s, when everything was just starting to come together.
Yet the book is always, definitively, Hadley's to narrate - and indeed, she does so quite sympathetically, in the first-person. In many ways, it is a re-telling of Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, as Ms. McLain pushes deeper into the lives of her characters while remaining true to the facts.
Ms. McLain eloquently captures the innermost feelings of Hadley as well as the Paris life at a heady and exhilarating time. Years later, Ernest Hemingway - who married four times in all - writes of Hadley, "I wish I had died before I loved anyone but her." I closed the pages of this book wondering how much better his life might have turned out had he remained with the woman he called "the best and truest and loveliest person I have ever known."
Recommended Reads: A Moveable Feast (Ernest Hemmingway), Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald (Therese Ann Fowler), Loving Frank (Nancy Horan), The Aviator's Wife (Melanie Benjamin)
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