The Paris Wife by Paula McLain

Finally, a good book that challenges my brain and entertains me, too. This book may technically be fiction (and definitely not a YA title since it was so detailed and beautifully crafted), but it's as good a "memoir" as if Hadley Richardson wrote it herself. The first person narrative covers Hadley's courtship and five year marriage to Ernest Hemingway. In it, Hadley casually mentions many of their various friends: Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. She tells of the free spirits they all had, judging by how frequently they all got drunk and wandered around Europe. None of them seem to live a traditional lifestyle, and it's extra nice if you know the real history that goes with each character (for example, Fitzgerald's exorbitant drunkenness and Zelda's insanity). If you know anything about Hemingway, the story has a familiarity. You are expecting the characters to go to the running of the bulls in Pamplona, you know The Sun Also Rises will become a big success, you know the expatriate attitude during the early 1920's, and you also know that the Hemingway marriage was doomed as soon as Pauline befriends Hadley. I thought Hemingway came across as insensitive and much like a selfish brat, although I don't think that was necessarily McLain's objective. The book is a thoughtful narrative, clearly well researched, although none of the scenes are attributed to specific sources--you just have to guess which ones were real and which were made up by McLain. I don't even care if the story was totally fiction; it was a really good read.