Working on this book was hands down the most fun I’ve ever had as a writer. Paris in the 20’s was such a singular time in history, and the Hemingways’ years there were so full of spectacular adventure and compelling encounters, that I felt entirely grateful to live it with them. I invented what I couldn’t know-all of their dialogue, for instance-but knew, in a deeper way, one that can’t be aided by all the biographies in the world, what lay at the heart of what I was imagining. Their emotional crisis-that terrible spring and summer when Hadley learns she’s been betrayed-occupies only a few taut pages in one well-regarded biography, but is the crux of my story. In many of Hemingway’s biographies, Hadley is quickly dispatched as “the first wife,” a youthful experiment gone awry. Parts of their story aren’t easy to understand-and yet I needed to understand them if I was going to fully inhabit the world that needed inventing: the interior one. There were things I simply needed to know about the choices he was making, and could only know those things from the inside out. That’s ultimately why I chose to write a few select passages from Ernest’s perspective. It pulls you inside their consciousness, and helps you see the world through their very particular point of view, unfolding the story only they can tell.
I simply fell in love with her, with them both.īeginning to truly hear a character’s voice is like finding a piece of magic string. Her speech rhythms, her intelligence and charm and sense of humor all come through with clarity and effervescence. It led me to seek out the letters she wrote to Ernest during their courtship, and that’s when I knew I could write the book. She has very little dialogue in A Moveable Feast, but what’s there is so evocative.
The most important step for me was getting Hadley’s voice. My work would be to use the framework of historical documentation to push into these characters’ hearts and minds, discovering their motivations, their deepest wishes. I didn’t have to invent a plot for them, nor did I want to. When I began to research my book, beginning with biographies of Hemingway and Hadley, and with their delicious correspondence, I knew the actual story of the Hemingway’s marriage was near perfect it was a ready-made novel, ripe for the picking. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.” I’m hoping my novel will work to illuminate not just the facts of Ernest and Hadley’s years in Paris, but the essence of that time and of their profound connection by weaving both the fully imagined and undeniably real. In Ernest Hemingway’s introduction to his memoir, A Moveable Feast, he writes, “If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction.
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