The Paris Wife: You've Been Reviewed!

The Paris Wife by Paula McLain
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A Moveable Feast is one of my favorite books, partially because I romanticize Paris in the 1920s. I romanticize the alcohol and the dancing and the artists and the cafe and the Gauloises and the cloche hats and the painting and the writing and the lunches that rolled into cocktail hour.


The Paris Wife is built slightly off of A Moveable Feast, taking, in my opinion, some of the most intriguingly quiet moments of Ernest and Hadley's life that are fictionalized in A Moveable Feat, and then fictionalizing them again to pull out every last ligament of romance. It's meta-romantic-romance, with all of the sturm-und-drang drama that follows the lives of all of those characters involved with the Hemingways, as well as the Hemingways themselves.


Though the book can be slow and languid, the way I imagine some Parisian afternoons must have moved, I didn't mind the pace. I liked being slowed down, experiencing the ups and downs of a marriage in it's earliest form. The Paris Wife is not the Real Housewives. It's just real, and it's just about a housewife, and that, to me, is engaging enough.


I did hope for a more satisfactory fictionalized ending to Hadley's story, even though I knew how her real-life story ended.   I didn't finish the book feeling disappointed, rather just feeling somewhat empty. The book was thick with the details of life in Paris, but felt empty near the end. I have to think that maybe... that was the point.



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