The Paris wife, by Paula McLain

Ernest Hemingway had a thing for St. Louis women - he married three of them in succession and Hadley Richardson was Wife Number One. In The Paris Wife, McLain has written a fictionalized account of their lives together in the Paris of the "Lost Generation." Friends and associates there included Gertrude Stein, Picasso, Ezra Pound, and Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald amongst others. This book has been highly praised. I found it absorbing but not all that special, although the device of telling it from Hadley's vantage point made it unique. The author could hardly improve on the other fictionalized version of this tale, which is Hemingway's first great success, The sun also rises. Into Hadley and Ernest's relatively happy life with baby "Bumby" (nicknames abound), comes the fashionable and fascinating Pauline Pfeiffer, destined to become Wife Number Two. Her duplicity at befriending the somewhat isolated Hadley (who is neither an artist nor an author, or even fashionable and is often left home alone with Bumby) then ultimately stealing her husband is one of the more interesting parts of the story. What the book did do for me was make me actually read Hemingway's version, which I had never done. 336 pp.