Best Books of the Year 2011
Nominee for Favorite Book of 2011, Winner for Readers’ Favorite Historical Fiction (2011), Nominee for Readers’ Favorite Goodreads Author (2011)
Sorry, but this one was regarding Ernest Hemingway—not my fav. We have to remember it’s a novel and certainly not penned by Wife Number One, Hadley Richardson. At twenty-eight years old in Chicago 1920, she definitely would have been termed a “spinster.” I don’t think it was the Jazz Age Paris that set Hemingway into a hard-drinking social life with some cronies who were already achieving name recognition, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. I think the man, well ahead of the myth, was already a hard-drinking narcissist who pulled Hadley along for the ride. And when it ended. It ended.
But what a ride it was!
This is the book club selection for March, discussed rather low key at our April meeting.
Hadley experienced a tragic childhood, from the suicide of her father to the death of a sister in a fire. Neither his family nor hers had been thrilled with the two together. Hadley was considered the old maid at 28 and Hemingway back from the war at just nineteen.
After she met Hemingway and together enjoyed a whirlwind romance, they were married in 1921. Shortly after, they moved to Paris where he struck up with contacts during his fledgling foreign correspondent days and Gertrude Stein in turn introduced him to additional authors who fed his need for the spotlight and his ego.
Living a fast-paced Bohemian life took a toll on the marriage; the drinking, the free-wheeling moral code, his lust writing the Great American Novel…and women. Her discovery of his affair with her friend, however, became the final straw.
Many thanks to our local well-stocked library for providing me with the opportunity to listen to and review this audiobook. The thoughts expressed here are my own as well as my interpretation of the consensus of the book club participants.
The publisher provides pointed questions for discussion at the book club.
Among the items specifically examined this time were:
►We were reminded a couple times that this book is fiction, a novel, not a biography. We can draw some conclusions but would have to independently research key details of interest.
►A big question regarding what her perceived role was, with the majority feeling it was to feed his ego, and unfortunately, following his success, no longer needed that extra support.
►We wondered what Hadley might have seen in him and the consensus generally felt that he took her out of her expected lonely, spinster life to one of discovering the big world out there.
►A big point of discussion was the loss of his entire work to date when she traveled to meet him. Did he ever really forgive her for losing all his manuscripts? Perhaps we’ll never know.
There were additional questions and discussions, of course, one being the lifestyle and the hard drinking of Paris life, and the contradiction of Hadley’s acquiescence to attending the running of the bulls (and death of the animals) by occupying herself with crocheting baby clothes.
Book Details:
Publisher: Random House Audio
Narrator: Carrington MacDuffie
Publication Date: February 22, 2011
Title Link(s):
Amazon-US | Amazon-UK | Barnes & Noble | Kobo
The Author: Paula McLain is the author of the New York Times bestselling novels The Paris Wife, Circling the Sun, Love and Ruin, and When the Stars Go Dark. Her latest novel, Skylark, a GMA January 2026 pick, is a mesmerizing tale of Paris above and below, revealing a story of courage and resistance that transcends time. McLain was born in Fresno, California in 1965. After being abandoned by both parents, she and her two sisters became wards of the California Court System, moving in and out of various foster homes for the next fourteen years. When she aged out of the system, she supported herself by working as a nurse’s aid in a convalescent hospital, a pizza delivery girl, an auto-plant worker, a cocktail waitress–before discovering she could (and very much wanted to) write. She received her MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan in 1996, and is the author of two collections of poetry, a memoir, Like Family: Growing Up in Other People’s Houses, and the debut novel, A Ticket to Ride. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, O: the Oprah Magazine, Good Housekeeping, Real Simple, Huffington Post, the Guardian and elsewhere.
©2026 V Williams
Addictive and prescient, The Compound is an explosive debut from a major new voice in fiction and will linger in your mind long after the game ends.
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