Big Read author explains pasion for Hemingway
If you haven’t heard of Paula McLain, this year’s featured author for The Big Read, don’t worry, you won’t be required to surrender your library card.
She’s published two books of poetry and a memoir, but only one other novel, “A Ticket to Ride,” before breaking out with “The Paris Wife.”
A resident of Cleveland, she teaches in the master’s program in poetry at New England College and John Carroll University.
McLain has written a note about her book and participation in The Big Read that appears in a pamphlet available at participating libraries.
In that note, she says she was “desperate for inspiration” for a second novel late in 2008 when she stumbled across Ernest Hemingway’s memoir, “A Moveable Feast,” about his early years in Paris.
Writes McLain: “In the final pages he writes of his first wife, Hadley, ‘I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.’ That line just killed me, and set me on a feverish pursuit to find out what really happened between these two young lovers so long ago.”
McLain says she found an archive of their love letters “and was immediately swept away.”
She writes that Hadley was an extraordinary woman in her own right, “but also the perfect vantage point to reveal a side of Hemingway we’ve never seen before.”
“I couldn’t be more thrilled that your libraries have selected ‘The Paris Wife’ for The Big Read,” she writes. “I’m grateful for your support, and have my fingers crossed that your reading community will be as captivated by Ernest and Hadley’s story as I am — and by the dazzling world of Jazz-age Paris I’ve worked so hard to re-create.”