This is the story of Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley Richardson. Through her eyes, we watch their 11 month romance, marriage and travels. Already knowing what type of person Hemingway was, the reader knows what kind of story is coming. What the author did so well, was research their romance. Like always, I loved the author’s note that tells why and how she wrote this story.

McLain mentions she taught Hemingway in high school English and became fascinated with his book “A Moveable Feast.” She notes that he wrote it “at the tail end of the 1950s and early ’60s (it was published in 1964, after his death), he was well into his fourth marriage.” She wondered then, why he was so fascinated with his first wife, that he would write such a passionate book about their time together.

She researched their notes to each other at the Hemingway archive at the JFK library in Boston. She says she found Hadley’s voice and found it “incredible—charming, candid, funny, romantic.”

It is all hard to watch - people warning her, Ernest taking advantage of her trust fund, her desire to try whatever it took to please him, to sacrifice anything and everything she wanted for him. It also has some beautiful moments of Paris, Shakespeare and Co, and all things European. 
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“It would be the hardest lesson of my marriage, discovering the flaw in this thinking. I couldn’t reach into every part of Ernest and he didn’t want me to. He needed me to make him feel safe and backed up, yes, the same way I needed him. But he also liked that he could disappear into his work, away from me. And return when he wanted to.” Ch 8

“Chasing your past is a lousy, rotten game, isn’t it?”
…
“Memory couldn’t be counted on. Time was unreliable and everything dissolved and died—even or especially when it looked like life. Like spring. All around us, the grass grew. Birds made a living racket in the trees. The sun beat down with promise.” Ch 15

“That’s what terrible, sordid situations did to you, made you act crazily, against your own truths, against your self.” Ch 41

“I was just the early wife, the Paris wife.”
…
“Life was painfully pure and simple and good, and I believe Ernest was his best self then. I got the very best of him. We got the best of each other.” Epilogue