CANR
WORK TITLE: THE LAST TRAIN TO LONDON
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.megwaiteclayton.com/
CITY: Palo Alto
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CANR 310
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born January 1, 1959, in Washington, DC; married Mac Clayton (a writer); children: Chris, Nick.
EDUCATION:University of Michigan, B.A., 1981, J.D., 1984.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Novelist. Latham & Watkins (law firm), Los Angeles, CA, attorney, 1984-91.
MEMBER:National Book Critics Circle.
AWARDS:Finalist, Bellwether Prize for The Language of Lights; honored for literary merit and historical accuracy, Langum Prize for American Historical Fiction, 2015, for The Race for Paris.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles and short fiction to periodicals, including Runner’s World, Shenandoah, Virginia Quarterly Review, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, San Jose Mercury News, Forbes, and the Literary Review.
SIDELIGHTS
Meg Waite Clayton is a novelist and essayist living with her husband and two young children in Palo Alto, California. She is the author of several novels, beginning with The Language of Light and The Wednesday Sisters.
Clayton’s first novel, The Language of Light, follows the struggles of a young, widowed mother raising her two children among the old-money estates near Baltimore, Maryland. Nelly Grace, the protagonist of the debut work, flees to the simple stone house that her great-grandfather built in the rolling horse country of Maryland. There she hopes to deal with the grief of her husband’s death and return to her old passion of photography. Emma Crofton, the powerful matriarch of the local hunt, helps to bring Nelly back to life, as does Emma’s enigmatic and handsome son, Dac, a horse trainer. Nelly wonders, however, if she is strong enough to deal with her photojournalist father, who now comes into her life again, bearing secrets from the past.
A contributor to Kirkus Reviews wrote: “First-timer Clayton takes a decorous stroll down memory lane.” Similar praise came from Bookreporter.com reviewer Bethanne Kelly Patrick, who noted: “Clayton has an old-fashioned sense of narrative and symbolism that will delight readers searching for a story with meaning, character and drama.”
Clayton’s second book, the 2008 novel The Wednesday Sisters, brought her more recognition as an author to watch. The novel is set in the late 1960s, amid cultural turning points like the women’s rights and peace movements, the summer of love, and the Apollo moon landing. Five housewives are brought together by their love of books and their ambitions to develop beyond the constraints deemed appropriate for middle-class women. Clayton writes on her home page: “Although my fiction is not closely autobiographical, I do draw heavily from my own emotions and experiences as I write.” She noted in an interview with a contributor to the Booking Mama blog: “Each of the ‘Wednesday Sisters’ does contain some little piece of me. Linda’s fear—for her children and for herself—is my fear. Brett’s tortured relationship with her ‘unfeminine intellect’ draws on my own discomfort as a girl who was talented at math when girls weren’t supposed to be. Kath’s darkest moments draw from a relationship of mine that ended unhappily. Frankie’s self-doubt and her chubby phases are mine, as is her experience with her first novel. Even Ally is me in her middle-of-the-night journey at the end of the book, drawn from my own experience as a mom.” In an interview published on the Random House website, Clayton further explained: “I wanted to write a novel about women who have dreams for themselves that they are struggling to reach for, that they don’t really begin to reach for until their friends urge them to. I originally set out to write a contemporary story, but I worried that women coming of age today have no great excuse for hesitating to reach for their dreams. … The choice of five traditional women was a deliberate one that I think comes out of an ‘aha’ moment I had at Michigan Law School, when my friend Liza Yntema dragged me to see some old class photos in Hutchins Hall, to show me how few women there were in classes not many years before us. I don’t think I had a clue what a difference the women’s movement had made in my life before that. That was definitely something I became more and more interested in exploring as I wrote The Wednesday Sisters. ”
Although a contributor to Kirkus Reviews complained that the novel is “formulaic,” it was generally well-received, with many reviewers—especially bloggers—seeing the novel as an excellent book club pick. Karen Haney wrote in a review for the Book Club Queen website: “This is a book club’s dream and for anyone who loves to read and aspires to write.” Bronwyn Miller likewise concluded in her review on Bookreporter.com that “Meg Waite Clayton’s stirring novel will appeal not just to those who secretly wish to be writers, but to anyone with a love of great books; anyone who has felt truly moved by a book or an author; and anyone who has had their dreams bolstered by good and faithful friends,” while Ruth King noted on her Bookish Ruth blog: “The characters grow as women and as friends through their writing, and that growth is a fascinating process to watch.”
Speaking with a contributor to the website Kepler’s: The Book Flap, Clayton described her third novel, The Four Ms. Bradwells: “[It] is a friendship story, much like The Wednesday Sisters. But it’s more clearly a mystery than anything I’ve written before. Four law school roommates gather thirty years later at a Chesapeake Bay summer home, on the eve of Betts’s appointment to the Supreme Court, only to have a skeleton fall out of their collective closet. It involves a secret they’ve kept in some ways even from each other, which now threatens not just Betts’s appointment, but their friendship, their reputations, and more. The result is a higher-stakes story than anything I’ve written—a new challenge for me.”
The secret, dealing with the death of a young man at a party the friends all attended three decades before, is dug up during the Senate hearing for Betts’s appointment to the court, and now the other three women—rebellious Ginger, good-girl Laney, and knowledgeable Mia—find themselves drawn into events of years ago when they were known as the Ms. Bradwells at the University of Michigan Law School where they, and Clayton, studied for the bar. The nickname comes from an infamous 1873 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Bradwell v. Illinois, finding that Myra Bradwell, though fully trained as a lawyer, had no inherent right to practice law. A justice writing for the majority found that women are unfit for the hurly-burly of professional life and better suited as wives and mothers. Over the years the four ambitious women have stayed friends, helping each other through good and bad times, each in their own way having suffered from male bias and discrimination. But this will prove to be their hardest test yet.
A Publishers Weekly reviewer was not so positive about this work, calling it a “clunky novel [that] is less about that mystery … and more about the women’s histories and careers.” Library Journal reviewer Jeanne Bogino had similar reservations, noting that the author “explores female relationships … far less engagingly” in this novel than in her earlier The Wednesday Sisters. Basil & Spice website reviewer David M. Kinchen, on the other hand, felt that The Four Ms. Bradwells “should naturally become a book club favorite.” Similarly, a Kirkus Reviews contributor concluded: “Though Clayton telegraphs her political points along with her plot and characterizations, there is a definite market for this kind of self-congratulatory women’s empowerment. This one meets all the requirements of Book Club Lit.”
In The Race for Paris, Clayton writes a story inspired by the experiences of photojournalists. In Clayton’s retelling, the protagonist, Liv, wants to take a jeep and report from the front, but the commanding officer refuses because she is a woman. Liv responds by convincing her friend Jane to go AWOL with her. Both women are determined to make it to Paris with the Allied troops, reporting their progress along the way. They meet a photographer named Fletcher and convince him to join them on their quest. While the trio falls into a tense love triangle, they avoid German troops, who want to kill them, and Allied military police, who want to arrest them.
Sharing her inspiration for the novel in an interview with Caroline Leavitt for her website Caroline Leavittville, Clayton remarked: “The idea for The Race for Paris actually came to me while I was doing research for my first novel, The Language of Light. I read photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White’s autobiography, Portrait of Myself. Something she said in that—about motherhood, I think I can say that much without spoiling the plot—really moved me. … The story really began to take shape when I read about how Martha Gellhorn got to cover the Normandy invasion. Only male journalists were allowed to go. … Martha stowed away in the loo of a hospital ship and went ashore with a stretcher crew, one of the very few correspondents to cover the invasion from French soil.” The author added: “And her reward for her bravery? She was taken into custody on returning to England, and stripped of her military accreditation, her travel papers, and her ration entitlements. She was confined to a nurses’ training camp until she could be shipped back to the U.S. So here’s what she did: She hopped the fence, hitched a ride on a plane to Italy, and covered the war without the benefit of her swanky military credential, sweet-talking wireless operators into sending her work out, while all the time looking over her shoulder for the military police charged with apprehending her.”
Bill Ott praised Clayton’s fictionalized portrayal in his Booklist review, asserting that “Clayton tells a story that will draw women’s-fiction readers as well as historical-fiction and WWII devotees.” Amy Gwiazdowski, writing on Bookreporter.com, was also impressed, remarking: “I started The Race for Paris expecting heartbreak, which I found in abundance, but what I didn’t anticipate was an amazing story of friendship and determination. You’ll be left exhausted and battered at the end, but it will be so worth it.” Piali Roy pointed out in Maclean’s: “The book illustrates a fundamental tension found in all wartime: Journalism, whether by men or women, was an essential part of the propaganda effort, with censors (and editors) making sure newspaper stories and images would not upset readers at breakfast, but it encouraged support of the war.”
Clayton’s sixth novel, Beautiful Exiles, presents a fictionalized account of the wartime years of famed journalist, Martha Gellhorn. In Key West, Florida, Gellhorn, already an accomplished journalist, meets the man of the day in literature, Ernest Hemingway. It is 1936, and their attraction for one another is instantaneous, increased by their shared love of writing. This relationship intensifies as they both cover the Spanish Civil War. Though married at the time, Hemingway began an affair with Gellhorn, living together off and on until Hemingway was divorced from his second wife and the couple married in 1940. Gellhorn covered the rise of the Nazis and reported on the war from locations including Finland, Hong Kong, and England. Meanwhile, Hemingway fumed at his absent wife, and competition arose between them as the world headed to D-Day.
Xpress Reviews contributor Elizabeth Stafford noted that Beautiful Exiles “delves into the tumultuous relationship between Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, his third wife.” Stafford further commented: “The writing is rich with detail; the exotic locales.” Writing in the Small Press Bookwatch, James A. Cox similarly commented: “As deftly written as any Hemingway novel, Meg Waite Clayton’s Beautiful Exiles is a compelling novel by an author with a genuine and impressive flair for character and narrative driven storytelling.” An Internet Bookwatch reviewer was also impressed, observing: “A beautifully crafted novel and an inherently fascinating story, Beautiful Exiles will prove to be a welcome and enduringly popular addition to community library collections.” Online Duende contributor Katheryne Mero also voiced praise, commenting: “Clayton’s prose is in as delicate a balance as their entire relationship: always tempestuous, but vibrantly light and dark, full of love and hate, jealousy and admiration. … Beautiful Exiles validates how important that time really was to the careers of two powerhouse writers.” Likewise, San Francisco Chronicle reviewer Joan Frank called the novel an “immensely ambitious undertaking, given the mountains of material already written by and about both authors.”
Clayton’s 2019 novel, Last Train to London, further explores actual events from the World War II era. The novel revolves around the efforts of one woman, Truus Wijsmuller, a childless Dutchwoman best known as Tante Truus, to get thousands of children out of Nazi-controlled Europe via the Kindertransport rescue. This is examined through the lives of two fictional characters from Vienna. Stephan Neuman is seventeen and Jewish. His friend, fifteen-year-old math prodigy Sofie-Helene Perger is not Jewish, but is in danger because of the anti-Nazi articles written by her journalist mother. The lives of these two later intersect with that of Tante Truus when she manages to secure them a place on one of the last trains to safety in England.
A Kirkus Reviews critic had a mixed assessment of Last Train to London, calling it “workmanlike and less riveting than the subject matter.” A Publishers Weekly Online reviewer, however, had a much higher opinion of Last Train to London, noting: “This is a standout historical fiction that serves as a chilling reminder of how insidious, pervasive evil can gradually seep into everyday lives.”
Clayton once told CA: “My writing routine is pretty simple: I sit down and write each morning, five or six days a week. I start by 8 a.m., and write until I have 2,000 words or until 2:00. If I have 2,000 words by 10:30, I can eat bonbons all morning and afternoon—although if I have 2,000 words by 10:30, I am staying glued to that chair until someone drags me from it, as that is a great writing day.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, April 15, 2008, Aleksandra Walker, review of The Wednesday Sisters, p. 26; June 1, 2013, Rebecca Vnuk, review of The Wednesday Daughters, p. 35; April 15, 2015, Bill Ott, review of The Race for Paris, p. 37.
Bookwatch, September, 2018, review of Beautiful Exiles.
Commonweal, December 5, 2003, review of The Language of Light, p. 27.
Internet Bookwatch, August, 2018, review of Beautiful Exiles.
Kirkus Reviews, October 15, 2003, review of The Language of Light, p. 1239; July 1, 2008, review of The Wednesday Sisters; November 1, 2010, review of The Four Ms. Bradwells; June 1, 2013, review of The Wednesday Daughters; July 1, 2019, review of The Last Train to London.
Library Journal, January, 2011, Jeanne Bogino, review of The Four Ms. Bradwells, p. 82; March 1, 2013, review of The Wednesday Daughters.
Maclean’s, August 17, 2015, Piali Roy, review of The Race for Paris, p. 69.
Publishers Weekly, March 3, 2008, review of The Wednesday Sisters, p. 28; December 6, 2010, review of The Four Ms. Bradwells, p. 27.
Small Press Bookwatch, October, 2018, James A.Cox, review of Beautiful Exiles.
Xpress Reviews, June 29, 2018, Elizabeth Safford, review of Beautiful Exiles.
ONLINE
Basil & Spice, http://www.basilandspice.com/ (March 21, 2011), David M. Kinchen, review of The Four Ms. Bradwells.
Book Club Queen, http://www.book-club-queen.com/ (June 9, 2009), Karen Haney, review of The Wednesday Sisters.
Booking Mama, http://bookingmama.blogspot.com/ (June 16, 2008), review of The Wednesday Sisters; (June 17, 2008), interview with author.
Bookish Ruth, http://www.bookishruth.com/ (August 31, 2008), Ruth King, review of The Wednesday Sisters.
Bookreporter.com, http://www.bookreporter.com/ (November 1, 2003), Bethanne Kelly Patrick, review of The Language of Light; (June 9, 2009), Bronwyn Miller, review of The Wednesday Sisters; (August 13, 2015), Amy Gwiazdowski, review of The Race for Paris.
Bookworm, http://thebookworm07.blogspot.com/ (June 8, 2008), review of The Wednesday Sisters.
Caroline Leavittville, http://carolineleavittville.blogspot.com/ (August 4, 2015), Caroline Leavitt, author interview.
Chicago Tribune, http://www.chicagotribune.com/ (May 13, 2011), review of The Four Ms. Bradwells.
Chicklit Reviews, http://www.chicklitreviews.com/ (March 20, 2011), review of The Four Ms. Bradwells.
Duende, http://www.duendeliterary.org/ (September 8, 2018 ), Katheryne Mero, review of Beautiful Exiles.
Examiner http://www.examiner.com/ (April 17, 2011), Bonnie Jean Adams, review of The Four Ms. Bradwells.
Fantastic Fiction, https://www.fantasticfiction.com/ (August 17, 2019), “Meg Waite Clayton.”
Good Morning Silicon Valley, http://blogs.siliconvalley.com/ (November 10, 2011), “Q&A with Meg Waite Clayton, Author.”
Greer Macallister, http://www.greermacallister.com/ (March 11, 2018), “WomensHistoryReads interview: Meg Waite Clayton.”
Hey Lady! Whatcha Readin’?, http://heylady.net/ (May 31, 2008), review of The Wednesday Sisters.
Kepler’s: The Book Flap, http://keplers.blogspot.com/ (March 17, 2011), “A Conversation with Meg Waite Clayton.”
Meg Waite Clayton, http://megwaiteclayton.com (August 17, 2019).
Publishers Weekly,https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (July 22, 2019), review of Last Train to London.
Random House, http://www.randomhouse.com/ (June 9, 2009), profile of author.
San Franciso Chronicle, https://www.sfchronicle.com/books/ (August 16, 2018), Joan Frank, review of Beautiful Exiles.
“We’ll be Friends Forever, won’t we, Pooh?’ asked Piglet.
‘Even longer,’ Pooh answered.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh
About Meg: the Basic Author Bio
Book club favorite and New York Times and USA Today bestseller Meg Waite Clayton is the author of seven novels, including The Last Train to London, which will be published by HarperCollins in the U.S. on September 10, 2019, and will be published in Czech by Grada, Danish by GADS, Dutch by HarperCollins-Holland, French by Les Escales, Hebrew by Matar, Italian by HarperCollins-Italia, Portuguese by HarberCollins-Iberica, Portuguese (Brazil) by HarperCollins-Brazil, Slovak by IKAR, and Spanish by HarperCollins-Iberica.
Her prior books include the #1 Amazon fiction bestseller Beautiful Exiles; the Langum Prize honored The Race for Paris; The Wednesday Sisters, named one of Entertainment Weekly’s 25 Essential Best Friend Novels of all time (on a list with The Three Musketeers!); and The Language of Light, a finalist for the Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction (now the PEN/Bellwether). She has written for the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Runner’s World and public radio, often on the subject of the particular challenges women face. A member of the National Book Critic’s Circle, she writes a monthly audiobook review for the San Francisco Chronicle.
Meg was born in Washington D.C., and has since lived in Kansas City, the Chicago area (Wheeling, Palatine, Northbrook), Los Angeles (Sierra Madre, West Hollywood, Santa Monica), Ann Arbor, Baltimore, Nashville, Santa Barbara and Palo Alto. She love to travel, so her books tend to be set in places she find fascinating: France for The Race for Paris, the English Lakes for The Wednesday Daughters, Ann Arbor and the Chesapeake for The Four Ms. Bradwells, Silicon Valley for The Wednesday Sisters, and the horse country of Maryland for The Language of Light. For Beautiful Exiles the list is long but includes in Key West, Sun Valley, New York, and St. Louis, as well as Cuba, Spain, China, France, England, Czechoslovakia, and Sweden. The Last Train to London is set in Vienna, Austria, and in England, the Netherlands, Germany, and (very briefly) Paris.
About Meg: a Bit of the Gory Detail
For me, being a novelist meant being able to leap tall literary buildings in a single bound, so I went off to the University of Michigan thinking I would become a doctor, and emerged as a corporate lawyer in a tidy blue suit. I was thirty-two by the time I worked up the nerve to give writing a serious try, and pregnant with my second son, who was eleven when my first novel was published. Writing, I’ve discovered, is a lot harder than it looks.
Along the way, I wrote short stories and essays, and more than a few pages that are in the proverbial drawer. I had great luck on the first piece I ever published, an essay called “What the Medal Means,” which sold quickly to the only publication I could imagine it in: Runner’s World. My fiction was slower going, though. I sent stories out again and again, revising each time until they did finally start appearing in publications like Shenandoah, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Literary Review.
My fiction is not closely autobiographical, but I do draw heavily from my emotions and experiences as I write. You can see those gory details on the Book Groups pages for some of the books, but suffice it to say here that I lived in ten different homes in Washington D.C., Kansas City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New Jersey before I went off to Ann Arbor, and in five more homes—in the Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, Baltimore, and Nashville—during and after my years in Ann Arbor, before finally settling in Palo Alto. In the process, I waved good-bye to so many dear friends, which is no doubt why friendships are at the core of my writing. I’m blessed with remarkable friends who are forever refilling that well for me, especially Jennifer Belt DuChene (my lawschool roommate and my closest friends in the world), my Tuesday sister and fellow novelist, Brenda Rickman Vantrease, and my Tuesday brother and husband, Mac Clayton. Like Betts from The Ms. Bradwells, I miss sitting on that ratty old couch on our law school house porch with friends who, like The Wednesday Daughters, have known me since before I knew myself. My writing is certainly an homage to their love.
As much as I enjoyed practicing law, my dream for as long as I can remember was to be a novelist. I feel incredibly grateful to be able to call myself one. Thanks to all of you who, in giving a little of your busy lives to follow my characters, allow me the pleasure of this life. – Meg
The video interview below was done by Lisa Van Dusen and Rachel Hatch for Palo Alto Online. More video, including book trailers here.
Meg’s Favorite Quotes on Friendship
There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature. — Jane Austen
Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: “What! You too? I thought I was the only one. “— C.S. Lewis
Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. — Mark Twain
And three from A.A. Milne:
Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind. “Pooh?” he whispered.
“Yes, Piglet?”
“Nothing,” said Piglet, taking Pooh’s hand. “I just wanted to be sure of you.”
“We’ll be Friends Forever, won’t we, Pooh?” asked Piglet.
“Even longer,” Pooh answered.
If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you.
Meg’s Favorite Classic Books
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Excellent Women by Barbara Pym
The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
Meg’s Favorite Contemporary Books
Charming Billy by Alice McDermott
A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
Last Orders by Graham Swift
A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines
Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
Three Junes by Julia Glass
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
Empire Falls by Richard Russo
Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler
Inventing the Abbots and Other Stories by Sue Miller
The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
Meg Waite Clayton
Meg Waite Clayton is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of five novels, including the forthcoming THE RACE FOR PARIS (August 2015), THE WEDNESDAY DAUGHTERS, THE WEDNESDAY SISTERS, THE FOUR MS. BRADWELLS, the Bellwether Prize finalist THE LANGUAGE OF LIGHT. Her books have been translated into languages from German to Lithuanian to Chinese. She's written for The Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, The San Jose Mercury News, The Miami Herald, Writer's Digest, Runner's World, and public radio, and for The New York Times and Forbes online. A graduate of the University Michigan and its law school, she lives in Palo Alto, California.
Genres: Historical, Sagas
New Books
September 2019
(paperback)
The Last Train to London
Series
Wednesday
1. The Wednesday Sisters (2008)
2. The Wednesday Daughters (2013)
Novels
The Language of Light (2003)
The Four Ms. Bradwells (2011)
The Race for Paris (2015)
Beautiful Exiles (2018)
The Last Train to London (2019)
Meg Waite Clayton
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
This article is an autobiography or has been extensively edited by the subject or by someone connected to the subject. It may need editing to conform to Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy. There may be relevant discussion on the talk page. (May 2016) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)
Meg Waite Clayton
Born
January 1, 1959
Washington, D.C. United States
Occupation
Novelist, essayist
Nationality
American
Alma mater
University of Michigan
Period
1995–present
Genre
Literary fiction
Website
megwaiteclayton.com
Meg Waite Clayton (born January 1, 1959 in Washington, D.C.) is an American novelist.[1]
Contents
1
Biography
2
Awards and honors
3
Bibliography
4
References
Biography[edit]
A graduate of University of Michigan Law School, Clayton also earned bachelor's degrees in History and Psychology from the University of Michigan. She worked as a lawyer at the Los Angeles firm of Latham & Watkins. She grew up primarily in suburban Kansas City and suburban Chicago, where she graduated from Glenbrook North High School.[2] She began writing in earnest after moving to a horse farm outside of Baltimore, Maryland, where her first novel is set. She now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
In addition to her work as a novelist, she has written for the Los Angeles Times,[3][4] Writer's Digest, Runner's World, and public radio.[5] [6][7][8]
Awards and honors[edit]
Clayton's first novel, The Language of Light, was a finalist for the 2002 Bellwether Prize for Fiction, now the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. Her novel The Wednesday Sisters became a bestseller[9] and a popular book club choice.[10][11][12] Her "After the Debate" on Forbes online[13] was praised by the Columbia Journalism Review as "[t]he absolute best story about women's issues stemming from the second Presidential debate."[14] The Race for Paris was a 2015 Langum Prizes Historical Fiction Honorable Mention.
Bibliography[edit]
The Language of Light (2003)
The Wednesday Sisters (2007)
The Four Ms. Bradwells (2011)
The Race for Paris (2015)
Beautiful Exiles (2018)
Meg Waite Clayton is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of six novels, including BEAUTIFUL EXILES, the Langum-Prize honored THE RACE FOR PARIS, THE WEDNESDAY SISTERS, which Entertainment Weekly's named one of the 25 Essential Best Friend Novels of all time, and THE LANGUAGE OF LIGHT, a finalist for what is now the PEN/Bellwether Prize. She's written for The Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The San Jose Mercury News, Writer's Digest, Runner's World, and public radio. A graduate of the University Michigan and its law school, she lives in California. www.megwaiteclayton.com; facebook.com/novelistmeg; @megwclayton
Meg Waite Clayton is the New York Times bestselling author of The Wednesday Daughters, The Four Ms. Bradwells, The Wednesday Sisters, and The Language of Light. Her books have been published in six languages, and her essays and stories have aired on public radio and appeared in national news publications. A graduate of the University of Michigan Law School, Clayton lives with her family in Palo Alto, California.
WomensHistoryReads interview: Meg Waite Clayton
March 11, 2018 in WomensHistoryReads
Today I'm thrilled to welcome to the blog Meg Waite Clayton, who wows critics and readers alike with her insightful, entrancing books. Not only a New York Times bestselling author, she was also honored by the Langham Prize committee for THE RACE FOR PARIS (which I adored.) Read more about Meg below!
Meg Waite Clayton
Greer: Tell us about a woman (or group of women) from the past who has inspired your writing.
Meg: As a group, the enormously talented and courageous women war journalists and photojournalists, including Lee Carson, Helen Kirkpatrick, Iris Carpenter, Ruth Cowan, Lee Miller, Dot Avery, Virginia Irwin, Margaret Bourke-White, and Martha Gellhorn, have inspired me. My first novel, The Language of Light, about a woman who aspires to be a photojournalist, has roots in Margaret Bourke-White's autobiography. And all my work has in some sense flown from that first novel.
My latest, The Race for Paris, draws directly from the experiences of all these World War II correspondents, who defied military regulations and gender barriers to cover the “race for Paris,” vying to be among the first to report from the liberated city in the summer of 1944. They did so by stowing away in bathrooms of Channel-crossing boats, going AWOL, hopping fences meant to contain them, struggling to get their photographs and stories out, and risking their lives. Despite being confronted with red tape and derision, denied access to jeeps and to the information and accommodations provided to their male colleagues at press camps, pursued by military police intent on returning them to the States, and even arrested and stripped of credentials, they proved that women could report from the front lines, and opened the way for generations of women to do things previously forbidden us.
Greer: And the way that you weave those truths with fiction makes for a fantastic story. How would you describe what you write?
Meg: My novels take place in different time periods, but they share a common thread in that they are--or at least are meant to be--inspirational stories about women finding the strength to overcome societal barriers unique to women. But I hope they are first and foremost not "message" but story. I like a great read that leaves me both laughing and crying, and that's what I try to write.
Greer: Yes. I've definitely done both while reading your novels! What do you find most challenging or most exciting about researching historical women?
Meg: Both challenging and exciting is the fact that there are so many amazing women in history who are not yet known, or known well enough. Exciting because that is so much story possibility. Challenging because there are only so many hours in a lifetime, and I want to write them all!
Greer: Ditto!
Meg: And for you: I'd love to know about a woman (or group of women) from the past who've inspired you. That is such a great question!
Greer: With a near-infinite number of answers, right? I'm always running across new names, but only one has inspired me enough to center an entire novel around -- Kate Warne, 19th-century detective and total bad-ass. If I were a biographer, it would have been intensely frustrating to discover that the information about her in the historical record is basically skeletal. But since I'm a historical novelist, I felt like the gaps in her story were the perfect invitation. I've said since the beginning that part of the reason I wrote the book was so more people would know her name, but only lately have I been able to articulate why her lack of name recognition bothers me so much: why do we all know the name of the man who assassinated Lincoln in 1865, but not the woman who saved his life by foiling an earlier assassination attempt in 1861? How different our country's history could have been. Get this woman into the history books!
Read more about Meg, her books, and her advice for writers at the links below:
www.megwaiteclayton.com
www.facebook.com/novelistmeg
Twitter: @megwclayton
QUOTE:
Workmanlike and less riveting than the subject matter.
Clayton, Meg Waite THE LAST TRAIN TO LONDON Harper/HarperCollins (Adult Fiction) $27.99 9, 10 ISBN: 978-0-06-294693-5
Clayton's (Beautiful Exiles, 2018, etc.) novel about the Kindertransport program joins the recent spate of Holocaust books (from All the Light We Cannot See to The Tattooist of Auschwitz) that allow readers to identity with heroes and survivors instead of victims.
The real-life heroine here is Truus Wijsmuller, the Dutch Christian woman instrumental in smuggling approximately 10,000 children out of the Reich and into England through the Kindertransport. The villain is the infamous Adolph Eichmann. Early in his career Eichmann authored the influential paper "The Jewish Problem," about how to rid the Reich of Jews. After Germany took over Austria he landed a powerful position in Vienna. In 1938, Truus met with Eichmann, who offered what he assumed was an impossible deal: If she could arrange papers for exactly 600 healthy children to travel in one week's time--on the Sabbath, when Jewish law forbids travel--he would allow safe passage. With help from British activists, Truus successfully made the arrangements and found refuge for all 600 children in England. Clayton intersects these historical figures and events with fictional characters trapped in Vienna. Aspiring playwright Stephan, 15 years old when the novel begins in 1936, comes from a wealthy Jewish family, manufacturers of highly prized chocolate candies. The Nazis strip ownership of the chocolate factory from Stephan's father and hand it to Stephan's Aryan Uncle Michael. A guilty collaborator torn between greed and love, Michael is the novel's most realistically portrayed character, neither good nor entirely evil. Sensitive, brilliant, and precocious, Stephan is naturally drawn to equally sensitive, brilliant, and precocious Žofie-Helene, a math genius whose anti-Nazi father died under questionable circumstances and whose journalist mother writes the outspokenly anti-Nazi articles about actual events, like Britain's limiting Jewish immigration and the invasion of Czechoslovakia, that punctuate the plot. After Kristallnacht Stephan ends up hiding in Vienna's sewers (a weird nod to Orson Welles in The Third Man), and Žofie-Helene's mother is arrested. Will Stephan and Žofie-Helene end up among the children Truus saves?
Workmanlike and less riveting than the subject matter.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Clayton, Meg Waite: THE LAST TRAIN TO LONDON." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2019. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A591279177/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b6a38b96. Accessed 12 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A591279177
Beautiful Exiles Meg Waite Clayton http://megwaiteclayton.com Lake Union Publishing 9781503900837, $24.95, www.apub.com
Beautiful Exiles is set in Key West in 1936, where journalist Martha Gellhorn meets literary icon Ernest Hemingway in a bar. Suddenly two people who have a way with words but not social skills begin a friendship despite the fact that Hemingway is married and both are immersed in the reporter's world and looming war. As they become involved while their separate writing talents are blossoming, Ernest and Martha become more than friends and even more than professional rivals, attracted to the same things that threaten to destroy them. A fast-paced, involving novel brings Hemingway and Martha's world and romance to life.
Please Note: Illustration(s) are not available due to copyright restrictions.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com/bw/index.htm
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Beautiful Exiles Meg Waite Clayton." The Bookwatch, Sept. 2018. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A558366255/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=aad0d262. Accessed 12 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A558366255
Clayton, Meg Waite. Beautiful Exiles. Lake Union: Amazon. Aug. 2018. 410p. ISBN 9781503900837. $24.95; ebk. ISBN 9781503933859. F
On the heels of best-selling author Paula McLain's Love and Ruin, Clayton (The Wednesday Sisters; The Race for Paris) delves into the tumultuous relationship between Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, his third wife. The writing is rich with detail; the exotic locales--from Madrid during the Spanish Civil War to D-day on Normandy's Omaha Beach to the couple's home in Cuba--are vividly portrayed; and major figures of the day from Eleanor Roosevelt to Gary Cooper make an appearance. Hemingway's increasing drinking and abusive behavior are even more starkly portrayed than in McLain's work; the reader is left to wish that Gellhorn (whom Hemingway creepily often called "Daughter") had listened to her mother's advice and her own forebodings and not married him after his second divorce was complete. Gellhorn, an accomplished novelist and war correspondent, was overshadowed in life and death by the Hemingway legend, although we can now be grateful that her legacy is being celebrated in these two strong works of historical fiction. Verdict As the same basic Hemingway-Gellhorn story is told in each novel, only the most devoted Hemingway (or Gellhorn) fan will probably want to read both.--Elizabeth Safford, Boxford Town Lib., MA
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Library Journals, LLC
http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/reviews/xpress/884170-289/xpress_reviews-first_look_at_new.html.csp
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Safford, Elizabeth. "Clayton, Meg Waite.: Beautiful Exiles." Xpress Reviews, 29 June 2018. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A546502457/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=14e1c62c. Accessed 12 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A546502457
QUOTE:
As deftly written as any Hemingway novel, Meg Waite Clayton's Beautiful Exiles is a compelling novel by an author with a genuine and impressive flair for character and narrative driven storytelling."
Beautiful Exiles
megwaiteclayton.com
Meg Waite Clayton
Lake Union Publishing
9781503900837, $24.95, HC, 384pp, www.amazon.com
Synopsis: Set in Key West, 1936, "Beautiful Exiles" by Meg Waite Clayton is the story of headstrong and accomplished journalist Martha Gellhorn, a reporter who is confident with words but less so with men when she meets disheveled literary titan Ernest Hemingway in a dive bar. Their friendship (forged over writing, talk, and family dinners) flourishes into something undeniable in Madrid while they're covering the Spanish Civil War.
Martha reveres him. The very married Hemingway is taken with Martha--her beauty, her ambition, and her fearless spirit. And as Hemingway tells her, the most powerful love stories are always set against the fury of war. The risks are so much greater. They're made for each other.
With their romance unfolding as they travel the globe, Martha establishes herself as one of the world's foremost war correspondents, and Hemingway begins the novel that will win him the Nobel Prize for Literature. "Beautiful Exiles" is a story of lovers and rivals, of the breathless attraction to power and fame, and of one woman (who is ahead of her time) claiming her own identity from the wreckage of love.
Critique: As deftly written as any Hemingway novel, Meg Waite Clayton's "Beautiful Exiles" is a compelling novel by an author with a genuine and impressive flair for character and narrative driven storytelling. While very highly recommended for community library General Fiction collections, it should be noted for personal reading lists that "Beautiful Exiles" is also available in a paperback edition (9781503949270, $14.95), in a digital book format (Kindle, $5.99), and as an unabridged MP3 audiobook (Brilliance Audio, 9781543674828 $14.99).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Cox, James A. "Beautiful Exiles: megwaiteclayton.com." Small Press Bookwatch, Oct. 2018. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A561685512/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=858e243e. Accessed 12 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A561685512
QUOTE:
A beautifully crafted novel and an inherently fascinating story, Beautiful Exiles will prove to be a welcome and enduringly popular addition to community library collections
Beautiful Exiles
Meg Waite Clayton
http://www.megwaiteclayton.com
Lake Union Publishing
9781503900837, $24.95, HC, 384pp, www.amazon.com
Set in Key West, Flordia, in 1936, headstrong and accomplished journalist Martha Gellhorn is confident with words but less so with men when she meets disheveled literary titan Ernest Hemingway in a dive bar. Their friendship (forged over writing, talk, and family dinners) flourishes into something undeniable in Madrid while they're covering the Spanish Civil War. Martha reveres him. The very married Hemingway is taken with Martha her beauty, her ambition, and her fearless spirit. And as Hemingway tells her, the most powerful love stories are always set against the fury of war. The risks are so much greater. They're made for each other. With their romance unfolding as they travel the globe, Martha establishes herself as one of the world's foremost war correspondents, and Hemingway begins the novel that will win him the Nobel Prize for Literature. "Beautiful Exiles" is a stirring story of lovers and rivals, of the breathless attraction to power and fame, and of one woman who is ahead of her time in claiming her own identity from the wreckage of love. A beautifully crafted novel and an inherently fascinating story, "Beautiful Exiles" will prove to be a welcome and enduringly popular addition to community library collections. It should be noted for the personal reading lists of Meg Waite Clayton fans that "Beautiful Exiles" is also available in a digital book format (Kindle, $4.99), and as a complete and unabridged audio book (Brilliance Audio, 9781543674828, $24.99, MP3 CD).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Beautiful Exiles." Internet Bookwatch, Aug. 2018. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A553627834/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=03ea8f04. Accessed 12 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A553627834
QUOTE:
Clayton's prose is in as delicate a balance as their entire relationship: always tempestuous, but vibrantly light and dark, full of love and hate, jealousy and admiration. ... Beautiful Exiles validates how important that time really was to the careers of two powerhouse writers
In the Trenches & the Clenches: A review of Beautiful Exiles by Meg Waite Clayton
September 8, 2018
Lake Union Publishing, 2018. pages. ISBN: 9781503900837
By Katheryne Mero
After just becoming Ernest Hemingway’s new wife in Beautiful Exiles, Meg Waite Clayton’s fictionalized version of writer Martha Gellhorn makes a very precise point when she says: “Martha G. Hemingway, that’s who it says I am. The real me reduced to a single letter and the most important bit of me is now that I am someone’s wife.” While Clayton’s Beautiful Exiles is a brilliantly fictionalized account of the nearly ten-year relationship between Gellhorn and her ex-husband Ernest Hemingway, it is also an exploration of a legacy of a woman that disappeared against the stature of her historically famous husband. Gellhorn, a war correspondent who smuggled herself onto a hospital ship and found a way to cover the allied invasion of Normandy, was already well-respected for her honest portrayal of war by the time she married Hemingway. Never as famous as her husband, Gellhorn found herself kicked to the side as the war in Europe began, but she didn’t let that stop her from getting the story. Through moving emotional insight twisted throughout the story, Clayton elaborates upon the complexities of two equally talented lovers who create a bevy of work while existing within their own chaos. At times incredibly funny, tragic, volatile, and heartbreaking, Clayton leads us through the beautiful mess of a marriage that contained too much ego to survive.
Clayton’s story begins with their first meeting: in a bar in Key West, Florida 1936, when Gellhorn was on vacation with her mother and brother. Having already published her first book, she is an impressionable writer attracted to Hemingway’s brilliance, while he is a star that attempts to offer guidance to the fledgling journalist. While their initial relationship is just as friends, their excitable conversation and witty banter playfully hint at the flirtation that eventually becomes romantic. The true excitement of the story doesn’t begin until their arrival in Spain, where Gellhorn first experiences a taste of war:
“I lay hugging the muddy earth and praying to a god I wasn’t sure I’d ever believed in, tensing in readiness at the boy’s every twitch. I couldn’t think for the fear. I could only run when he ran, and flatten when he did, and try to keep from crying from the pain and exhaustion and fear.”
The war description doesn’t spare any details, always remaining clear and honest in its attention to the downsides of war:
“An old woman and a terrified little boy hurried through the square toward the imagined safety of home one afternoon as a shell crashed into shards of hot, sharp steel that pierced the boy's neck. It happened, and because it could happen to any of us—anytime, anywhere—as long as it didn’t happen to us, we lived as best we could.”
Clayton’s language is gutsy, a voice one might expect of someone witnessing war in a personal way, but she also delivers vulnerability in the midst of explosions and death. The budding relationship between Gellhorn and Hemingway is written so delicately, with a painful shyness between them that goes almost beyond intimate.
“I suppose I might write about the boys in the hospital,’ I said, rolling over to face him, wanting to give back some of the attention he was forever giving me. He’d once been a wounded boy in the hospital. He could make readers feel that story. He was so like Bertrand, with such a thick crust of charm and success that no one looked more closely, no one saw the thin fissures which the real stuff he was made of oozed.”
As Gellhorn peels away Hemingway’s layers, Clayton explores the little pieces that made him so lovable but traumatic.
While the story often focuses on Gellhorn’s relationship with Hemingway, Clayton also explores the relationships that build Gellhorn to the level of emotional maturity to exist within her marriage.
“Dad was dead a year by the time I danced with The Swede in Key West, but I carried his disapproval in my head like a tumor. If I led a man on, if I swam with him and danced with him and kissed him, well, I ought to be thinking of my reputation and be a better girl than that.”
These nagging criticisms haunt her. As a positive influence, Gellhorn’s mother, Edna, nicknamed Matie, is a true delight to read. Once a suffragette who lobbied for the woman’s vote, Matie’s influence is one that sounds too modern for a woman born in the 1900’s. “She preferred a man who would believe her his equal in every way when men just didn’t, who would gather liberal minds of all races to his dining table and the devil be damned if a white man wasn’t supposed to invite a black one through the front door.” Matie’s interactions with the younger Gellhorn serve to challenge and invigorate, as she quotes her daughter’s own letters, suggesting her mistakes lay directly in front of her. In one pivotal scene, after making the trip to Idaho for the wedding, Matie tries one final time to discourage her daughter from what she feels is the wrong choice. “You’d rather I live in sin?” Gellhorn asks. Her mother’s response: “Yes, I would.” These parental viewpoints often bleed into the dialogue she has with Hemingway, and others, as she tries to build a confident impression of what kind of woman she is.
The story is a careful piecing together of intricate details and life-changing events that somehow made their lives. While Clayton’s research includes visiting the Hemingway homes and piecing together of Gellhorn’s written material, it also includes the perspectives of other correspondents and celebrities the pair interacted with. As Gellhorn and Hemingway bounce across the globe writing, drinking, and loving, Clayton’s prose breezes easily through wherever in the world they decide to go: leaving Key West as Hemingway’s marriage crumbles beneath him; family vacations in Idaho; the new home shared by Gellhorn and Hemingway in Cuba; business trips to New York, and Presidential dinners in Washington, to the eventual coverage of war: in Hong Kong, Helsinki. London, Paris, and Madrid. There is even a chapter in Texas, where the pair stop to enjoy a few daiquiris only to find out the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor. In the middle of this globe-trotting are moments that are sensational celebrity antics: Hemingway’s fist fight with Orson Welles, having dinner with the Roosevelts, going on vacation with Gary Cooper and Howard Hawkes, or getting war credentials with the wrong name on them with Ginny Cowles in London. This stylish imagining offers the reader the fantastic possibility of adventure against a war-torn world of sadness and despair, hope and revival, friendship and love.
Martha Gellhorn's amazing life is a logical choice to be fleshed into reality by historical fiction. She was exactly the type of woman that the world doesn't see enough of, an impeccable balance of modern womanhood: valiant but vulnerable, intelligent and compassionate, resourceful and forgiving. This true beauty is expressed by Clayton's storytelling, as she attempts to capture two larger than life individuals with cohesive charm and style. Clayton's prose is in as delicate a balance as their entire relationship: always tempestuous, but vibrantly light and dark, full of love and hate, jealousy and admiration. And in the middle, a frailty that exists in all humanity, a deep-seated rejection that keeps us always leaving to avoid pain. As Clayton has Gellhorn explain:
"But there was no me in his magic, and the way the magic came to him wasn't the way magic came to me. I had to go out and find it. I had to live in the world, not holed up in a quiet corner with a cook and a pool and cats to rub against my legs."
Fundamentally, these two clashed, but for a little while they shared enough to produce unique magic. While history will always remember them for the period that they shared together, Beautiful Exiles validates how important that time really was to the careers of two powerhouse writers.
QUOTE:
This is a standout historical fiction that serves as a chilling reminder of how insidious, pervasive evil can gradually seep into everyday lives.
Last Train to London
Meg Waite Clayton. Harper, $27.99 (464p) ISBN 978-0-06-294693-5
Clayton (Beautiful Exiles) reaches into the troubled lives of the Third Reich’s civilian victims, drawing readers into one woman’s efforts to save children in this excellent novel based on actual events. Geertruida Wijsmuller, known as “Tante Truus” and part of the Dutch resistance, is determined to risk everything to save children of all ages despite—or because of—her inability to bring a pregnancy to term herself. In Vienna, the lives of two children are highlighted: Stephan Neuman is Jewish, and because he turned 17 in 1938, he’s barely allowed to escape to England in the 1938–1939 Kindertransport, which will not accept 18-year-olds. Stephan’s friend and budding beloved, 15-year-old Sofie-Helene Perger, is not Jewish, but her mother is a journalist who refuses to stop writing articles critical of Hitler. Stephan, an aspiring playwright, must adapt to the changes in his life, which was once filled with wealth from his father’s famous chocolate factory. Math prodigy Sofie also tries to adapt, uncertain about how to help Stephan without threatening her own family. The children and Tante Truus’s stories don’t intersect until later in the book, when she secures them safe passage to England due to a daring, last-second decision. Clayton effectively captures the dim hope of survival amid the mounting terror of the lead-up to WWII. This is a standout historical fiction that serves as a chilling reminder of how insidious, pervasive evil can gradually seep into everyday lives. Agent: Marly Rusoff, Marly Rusoff & Associates, Inc. (Sept.)
DETAILS
Reviewed on : 07/22/2019
Release date: 09/01/2019
Genre: Fiction
Ebook - 464 pages - 978-0-06-294696-6
QUOTE:
immensely ambitious undertaking, given the mountains of material already written by and about both authors."
Beautiful Exiles,’ by Meg Waite Clayton
By Joan Frank Aug. 16, 2018
Comments
2
1
of
2“Beautiful Exiles”Photo: Lake Union Publishing
2
of
2Meg Waite ClaytonPhoto: Adrienne Defendi
In her sixth novel, “Beautiful Exiles,” Meg Waite Clayton continues to investigate — and inhabit — the lives and fortunes of women who ripped open the envelope of their eras’ social and cultural limitations. This time, Clayton dives into the mind and heart of prolific, outspoken journalist and novelist Martha Gellhorn (1908-98), a war correspondent who also happened to become Ernest Hemingway’s third wife.
“Exiles” is an immensely ambitious undertaking, given the mountains of material already written by and about both authors — as is imagining oneself into the scrappy, unquiet Gellhorn’s very being. Clayton read a staggering amount for this project (listed in an afterword); we readers unfamiliar with Gellhorn’s work must assume the narrating voice of “Exiles” to be a good likeness (though on occasion one wonders whether Gellhorn would agree).
“Exiles” commences with Gellhorn’s first meeting Hemingway (in a bar, naturally) in 1936 Key West, Fla. Though already a fan and dazzled by his suave machismo, she remains cool-headedly critical of both Hemingway’s work and his bluster “[W]hen a man brags like that, most often the person he’s trying to convince is himself.” They flirt acceleratingly (though he still lives with second wife Pauline and two sons), until they decide to cover the Spanish Civil War as journalists. Love is consummated between falling bombs in Madrid, and in no time they are crawling together through bullet fire. “Marty here is the bravest girl I’ve ever met, braver than I am,” Ernest boasts to the soldiers. And while Martha doesn’t buy it, “It made me want to prove him right.”
For the balance of this love-sex-booze-intrigue-politics-war-literary culture-travel-packed saga — their beautiful Cuban estate, Hemingway’s sons, divorces, books, stars (Gary Cooper, Scott Fitzgerald, Antoine de St. Éxupery, the Roosevelts) — Clayton works hard to serve up micro and macro: intimate words and sensuous moments set against the world’s strife and (later) World War II. Always, Gellhorn is driven to get to the action and write about it, dooming the already contentious union. Though she lives well past its demise, “Exiles” suggests that the years with Hemingway formed a kind of defining backbone of vibrant, if bittersweet, memory.
“Do we ever really know how a thing will end until it does?” Hemingway asks her, midway. “Sure enough we’ll end up dead like everyone does,” Gellhorn responds. “The timing is the only thing.”
Beautiful Exiles