Sometimes the strangeness of the process wore me out. There were days when I would look at the lights set up around my dining-room table and wonder how I could endure another minute. There were times when I saw Barbara setting up a shot and worried that the whole endeavor was deeply flawed, a funhouse mirror masquerading as a regular mirror. And there were times when I heard my own voice as it left my mouth and worried about how false I sounded. But I got through it. Barbara helped me get through it. And when Barbara and I didn’t see eye to eye, or when my energy flagged, Bobby helped me get through it—he was always there to hear my concerns and remind me of my broader goals. In the end, we had a product that both of us were proud of, an account of my family’s emotional life that was sensitive and nuanced—if not purely “true,” whatever that means.
More than that, it was an account of family life in general—of the bizarre dynamics that inevitably crop up when flawed people are placed in close proximity to one another for extended periods of time. When I watched the finished film, I thought about what Lisa had told me when we started: that audience members would connect with different aspects of the story, depending on their own histories. And I thought forward to the story I was now certain I would tell on my own. I began to understand that my story was useful not only on its own terms, but as a trigger for other stories, that autobiographical honesty was contagious. If I was inspired by Running from Crazy, others would be as well.
The documentary also helped me develop a new understanding of the movie business. In 2014, I was invited to the Golden Globe Awards to honor Woody Allen, who was receiving the Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award. Woody didn’t attend, of course, so in his place the organizers assembled a table of performers associated with his films. I was nervous before the event. I went through a hundred different ideas about my hair and my clothes. When I got to the Beverly Hilton, my nerves fell away. I felt a surge of warmth. That lasted about four minutes. Then I started thinking again. Mainly, I thought about the strangeness of the industry. Look, there’s Drew Barrymore. Why do I see her here rather than bumping into her at the supermarket or in the park? There’s Meryl Streep. We were in Manhattan together, up for Oscars the same year; was that a lifetime ago or maybe even more? And there’s Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson. We used to socialize. Are we still friends in the real world?
And then, late in the evening, Cate Blanchett won Best Actress for Blue Jasmine. Her acceptance speech was gracious and funny, and she devoted a section of it to the actresses who had anchored Woody’s movies before her, including me. While Cate was talking, I looked around the room. All my questions about social propriety and professional awkwardness vanished. I saw only people who were proud of a colleague. Their pride was the result of the fact that they recognized the worthiness of the award, which in turn was a result of the emotional truth of Cate’s performance. Playing a self-deceiving upper-class woman in the midst of a streak of bad luck—a Woody-flavored version of Blanche DuBois—she somehow touched a wide range of viewers. What Cate did with Woody was, miraculously, a type of universal storytelling. I suddenly understood what I needed to do with my own story.
This kind of storytelling is central to human existence, whether or not people know it. Everyone needs to take control of his or her own life by making sense of it. It doesn’t matter how conventional or unconventional that process is. Another example: A few months ago the phone rang and I picked up. “Hiiiii,” the voice on the other end said, stretching out the word for maximum effect. It was Muffet, calling from Twin Falls, where she lives and is looked after by a lovely woman. “It’s so great to hear your voice. I miss you so much.” We traded small talk about the last time I had seen her, when I gave her a Starbucks charge card so she could buy herself all the coffee she wanted. “Right,” she said. There was a pause. “By the way,” she said. “You know what? I could use a bit more money.” I waited. Instructions were sure to follow. “Could you send me a check for twenty thousand dollars? Send it here and don’t tell Vonda.” I told her I’d send the money. “Great,” Muffet said. “The money from Russia is on the way. The aristocrats that I’ve been dealing with, the princes, they’re sending me the cash. It’s almost here. When it gets here, I’ll pay you back.” We hung up, after which I sat and thought about how my relationship with Muffet had evolved. There was a time when I would have reacted to her request by getting upset. I would have set the phone down and mourned my older sister, lost in her own madness. But that time passed long ago. It turned into something else: a realization that Muffet, like everyone else, is telling her own story. Objecting to the details of that story would be pointless and even counterproductive. She passes through the world surrounded by her own understanding of it, just as we all do. In her case, the perspective is somewhat unique—very few people live with the mix of fantasy and reality that she does—but it’s still central to her life. As a young woman, she was the purest person in the bunch, and that’s what she remained.
In interviews, people always ask me what it feels like to be part of the Hemingway family. I never know exactly how to answer, because the truth is that I spend more time thinking about what it feels like to be part of the much broader family of flawed, hopeful, intermittently improving humans. When people see the Hemingway part of my name in boldface, they miss out on everything else: on the fact that I grew up in suburban America in the seventies just like they did, that I sang along to the same Moody Blues records they did and had the same fears about being tall and flat-chested they did, and that I loved and pitied my father and loved and resented my mother. Seeing the Hemingway in boldface prevents them from seeing the divorced mom who loves and is loved by her daughters, or the amateur chef who spends hours in the kitchen cooking for guests, or the pet owner who runs with her dogs in the California hills, or the klutz who drops things, or the voluble e-mail correspondent who uses too many emoticons. Did my family have more than its share of sadness and self-destructive habits? Perhaps, but as I have learned from speaking to groups across the country, sadness and self-destructive habits are everywhere, including the places where you’d least expect to see them. My story is extraordinary in some ways, because of the ways in which my family lived in the public eye, but that should work as a point of contact rather than a point of separation. As I live in the present, make my peace with the past, and think about the future, I am trying to keep this in mind: that we’re all here on the same planet, that we’re all lifting weights and setting down burdens, that we’re all putting our feet where our feet need to go.
EPILOGUE
A LETTER FROM CUBA
IN 2014, I GO TO CUBA. I am there to play a cameo in a film about my grandfather. Hair and makeup people transform me into a woman of the 1950s: brown wig, cat-eye glasses, cream suit. The whole scene is shot at a table, which means the audience will never see my feet. I wear my own sandals.
I am playing a New Yorker writer who may or may not be based on Lillian Ross. I have come to interview my grandfather, laugh at his jokes, record his wise remarks. So here we sit eating roast pig, black beans and rice, fried plantains, and cabbage. It is vile to look at and repulsive to smell, and after six hours I couldn’t bear to think about lifting it to my lips, but that’s the magic of acting. Grape juice, playing the part of wine, is poured and repoured for every take, though the first time around, the Cuban prop guy fills the glasses with real wine. He didn’t see anything wrong with it.
My character’s name is Dorothy Evans, and she has one line: “What do you get for a short story now, Papa? A hundred dollars a word?” The line feels heavy in my mouth, and it never comes out in a way that makes me completely happy. It’s not the line I want to say. I want to say something meaningful. I want to be there for him. Instead, I feel like an outsider. It’s not the fault of the film. The film seems wonderful, which is why I have agreed to participate. It’s filled with talented actors: Joely Richardson is playing Mary, my grandfather’s last wife; Adrian Sparks, who has played my grandfather seve
ral times onstage, plays him here too; and Giovanni Ribisi is Denne Petitclerc, the author of the screenplay, whose friendship with my grandfather formed the basis for the film. When I was young, Petitclerc was always in Idaho. He and his wife, Wanda, had a house in Ketchum. Ribisi is amazing at bringing him back to life. I am honored to be watching them all and to help them bring their vision of my grandfather to life. My boyfriend, Bobby, is an extra, looking more like Don Draper than even Jon Hamm does, and it’s clear to me that they’ll have to keep the camera off him—otherwise people will be drawn in. This makes me smile, because I love him and always see the power of his presence.
I watch Adrian Sparks especially closely, because I feel I know my grandfather, and I want to see how he’s coming to life in the film. But why do I feel that? I never met the man. I have only read books and scripts and biographies, just like everyone else. But that’s maybe a twinge of false modesty or strategic democracy. The fact is that I do have a stronger connection to him. I grew up hearing stories and seeing pictures, and I lived through a lifetime with the son he created, my father. Not a day goes by in my life where there is not a reference to Ernest Hemingway in connection to me, and there is a cumulative effect, both for others and within myself. The fact that I never met Papa is secondary to trying to digest his legend and trying to understand whether that affected how my family was in the world. Did he help to create a genetic puzzle that will never be completely solved? The Finca Vigía, where we’re filming, where he lived, is a house stamped with distinction. It is not grand, but it has a grand presence, and it holds the man.
Can you know someone without meeting him? When I was eleven, in Paris, Papa spoke to me in the pages of A Moveable Feast. That’s the book of his that touched me first and most deeply, and now I am producing a film version of it. And more than that, I am writing. I am writing my own story, writing about how he matters or does not matter within that story. And while that could be (should be?) frightening, it’s life-affirming. I am a Hemingway in name, in appearance, and in character. I don’t go to bullfights or kill big game. But the Papa I feel here at the Finca Vigía is a more familiar type, someone who loved so deeply that it hurt him to show it, a man who was so aware of his own vulnerability that he built walls around it and shunned those closest to him. He loved the children near his home and helped them create a baseball team. But then he withdrew inside himself and abandoned the people who needed him: my father, for one. He abandoned them when he killed himself, but he abandoned them many times before that too. When he left my grandmother, Hadley, shortly after my dad’s birth, he weighed a life of normalcy and love against a life of creative devotion. It is said that he loved Hadley more than any woman he was ever with, and that in leaving her he chose to be Ernest Hemingway, Great Writer, rather than Ernest Hemingway, man, husband, father. No one can say for sure, but I imagine that he felt cornered, that he felt that he couldn’t have both lives. I have made the opposite sacrifices, choosing family over career or others over myself. Have those sacrifices made me happier than they made him?
I am not a Hemingway scholar, but I am a Hemingway, and to me, that means that I have a ticket to understanding a world of darkness, of courage, of sadness, of excitement, and—at times—of complete lunacy. And yet, other people with other names feel these things too. It may just be that they don’t have an American myth to which they can connect themselves. We all live our stories with a sense of panic and, hopefully, come out of them at some point with a sense of calm.
These are complicated ideas with simple results. I have learned, over time, to tell my story, and I have arrived in a place of calm. That means comfort, finally. It means being a woman, being loved and loving when I want, but not feeling obligated to be either. It means being comfortable with my mind and my body, both for their abilities and their limits. It also means being able, whenever necessary, to reinvent myself, to be new. Above all, it means taking responsibility for who I am. I think of a quote by a writer I’m not related to, the poet Audre Lorde: “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.” Some days it’s a lovely ride, with shafts of light knifing down through dark clouds, and some days a shelf of my mother’s porcelain falls and I cry for hours missing the woman I lost to cancer decades ago. I loved her so much and was sad that others couldn’t see why. I cry for my sister Margaux too, who was so loved by her friends but couldn’t show that part of herself to her family.
The beauty of humanity is in this balance. We hold some problems in and let others go. We reflect at times and express at other times. We accommodate others and we assert ourselves. We learn to live without some things and we sharpen our desire for other things. We forgive ourselves for our fears and we forge bravely ahead. That’s what I feel most here in Cuba, that my grandfather learned to express his desire, that he made a world around him rather than simply being turned to powder by his stresses and disappointments. The world injured him, but he moved past that. We have all done that, as best as possible. Over the course or our lives, trapped in our lives, liberated by our lives, we became strong at the broken places.
Elsa and me hunting in Idaho. I’m eight.
Mom, Dad, Margot, and me in the Grand Tetons, Wyoming.
At Dan and Mary Kay’s house in Oregon.
At a lake in the Tetons with two of my mother’s friends. I’m on the far right.
My mom, in a happy moment during a period of remission.
My dad fishing in the seventies.
Arrived in Idaho: Margot, my parents, and me outside of our new house in the late sixties.
The kid doesn’t completely stay in the picture; with the whole family.
Muffet holds me up while Margot holds a teddy bear I got for my second birthday.
My dad, right around the time my mother died.
My mom, before she married my dad.
My parents at Christmas.
My eventful second birthday.
Me at age three.
My daughters Langley at age four (left) and Dree at age six (right) with Muffet.
Me, Margot, and my mom in the Tetons.
Muffet with me after my christening. What hair!
Another christening picture, this time with the whole family.
My sisters at the airport in Hailey, Idaho.
Margot playing bride in Mill Valley, California.
Muffet’s high school photo in Mill Valley.
Margaux’s wedding to Bernard Faucher.
Fixing up Margaux’s hair for the wedding
The 3 M’s—Margaux, Mariel, and Muffet.
Me and my mother.
Me and my dad at Margaux’s wedding.
Me and my dad at Margaux’s wedding.
Dad and me at the Cannes film festival in 1979.
Posing at Cannes.
Dad walking me down the aisle at my wedding in 1984.
A family photo with Stephen’s mom, Dorothy Crisman.
Me and Dree snuggling. She’s five.
Dree and Langley in Idaho.
Mother and daughters in a Mother’s Day ad campaign.
Shot from a yoga photo session.
In the garden for a Mariel’s Kitchen cooking shoot.
With my daughters at a New York City premiere, 2010. (Photograph © Jason Kempin/Getty Images)
APPENDIX
RESOURCES for MENTAL HEALTH, SUBSTANCE ABUSE, and BETTER LIVING
ONE THING I’VE LEARNED is that just as solutions are imprecise, so are problems. My parents drank, but was alcohol really the cause of my childhood anxiety and adult disaffection? That’s hard to say. My sister Muffet suffered from mental illness from a relatively early age, but her problem touched off a domino effect of related problems. My parents felt guilty that they couldn’t rescue their daughter from herself. My sister Margaux felt frustrated with all the attention that went into caring for Muffet. I reacted by demonstrating repeatedly and obviously just how sane I was. Suicide, depression, ob
sessive-compulsive tendencies: none of these exist in isolation. Problems in families are part of an intricate ecosystem. One causes a second or allows a third to grow in suddenly fertile soil.
As a result, when I’m asked what services, foundations, and groups are helpful for family dysfunction, I tend to think in terms of a wide net. I’m more likely to say that something might work than that it won’t, and more likely to say that it might work than that it will. Most of these are services I haven’t used personally, so I can’t vouch for them myself, but I’ve heard good things about them.
There’s also a real and proven link between mental health and other kinds of health: physical on the one hand, spiritual on the other. It’s something that I have believed since I was a little girl. The more I research the matter, the more I’m sure that my initial instinct was correct. That’s why I have also included resources for nutrition, exercise, and spiritual balance. A healthy mind goes in partnership with a healthy body and a healthy soul.
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