I just finished reading The Paris Wife and I had a few thoughts about it. I did enjoy it, but wasn’t completely enthralled. It was great in many ways, well-written and the character-development made me think “this was actually what Ernest Hemingway was like”, buuuut I had a few issues with it. 

For one, I’m not sure I totally understood the need for this “historical fiction” in the sense that SO many facts about Hemingway and Hadley were true, yet the actual story was fiction. I think I would have rather read a non-fiction about these two to get the facts and not feel the need to spend so much time sorting out fact from fiction. Wikipedia helped me sort out some of the facts and I spent more hours than I’d care to admit googling images and facts about these two while I was reading it. 

Secondly, I was really angry with how Hadley reacted towards the end of this book. *SPOILER ALERT* When she discovered Ernest’s affair, I hated the way she responded and how she became so weak in the face of it all. The feminist in me was all riled up and wanted to shake her! I guess it’s good when a novel makes you feel passionate in whatever way, but regardless of whether this was the ’20s or not, I’d like to think that Hadley had a bit more of a spine in real life (and didn’t let her husband’s mistress get into bed with him, while she was IN it- uggggh).