A chance encounter in Spain in 1959 brought young Irish reporter
Valerie Danby-Smith face to face with Ernest Hemingway. The
interview was awkward and brief, but before it ended something had
clicked into place. For the next two years, Valerie devoted her
life to Hemingway and his wife, Mary, traveling with them through
beloved old haunts in Spain and France and living with them during
the tumultuous final months in Cuba. In name a personal secretary,
but in reality a confidante and sharer of the great man's secrets
and sorrows, Valerie literally came of age in the company of one of
the greatest literary lions of the twentieth century.
Five years after his death, Valerie became a Hemingway herself when
she married the writer's estranged son Gregory. Now, at last, she
tells the story of the incredible years she spent with this
extravagantly talented and tragically doomed family.
In prose of brilliant clarity and stinging candor, Valerie evokes
the magic and the pathos of Papa Hemingway's last years. Swept up
in the wild revelry that always exploded around Hemingway, Valerie
found herself dancing in the streets of Pamplona, cheering
bullfighters at Valencia, careening around hairpin turns in
Provence, and savoring the panorama of Paris from her attic room in
the Ritz. But it was only when Hemingway threatened to commit
suicide if she left that she realized how troubled the aging writer
was-and how dependent he had become on her.
In Cuba, Valerie spent idyllic days and nights typing the final
draft of "A Moveable Feast," ""even as Castro's revolution closed
in. After Hemingway shot himself, Valerie returned to Cuba with his
widow, Mary, to sort through thousands of manuscript pages and
smuggle out priceless works of art. It was at Ernest's funeral that
Valerie, then a researcher for "Newsweek," met Hemingway's son
Gregory-and again a chance encounter drastically altered the course
of her life. Their twenty-one-year marriage finally unraveled as
Valerie helplessly watched her husband succumb to the demons that
had plagued him since childhood.
From lunches with Orson Welles to midnight serenades by mysterious
troubadours, from a rooftop encounter with Castro to numbing
hospital vigils, Valerie Hemingway played an intimate,
indispensable role in the lives of two generations of Hemingways.
This memoir, by turns luminous, enthralling, and devastating, is
the account of what she enjoyed, and what she endured, during her
astonishing years of living as a Hemingway.
"From the Hardcover edition."
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