What's your writing process, and was the writing process for Mrs Hemingway different to that of your first novel?

I really like writing in the morning, when I feel most fresh and have most of my ideas. By the afternoon my brain is zonked and not good for much, although if I’m editing I can do this all day. If I’m writing a first draft I can only work for a few hours on it. I find first drafts really difficult – that whole thing of tricking something from nothing. I like writing in cafés but also at home. 

Mrs. Hemingway involved far more research than The Godless Boys, so I spent a lot of time in the British Library, checking facts and dates. Sometimes I’d find myself writing with my nose still pressed up against a biography! All in all, I spent about six months researching and writing each of Hemingway’s wives, and then a year for the edit.

You’ve spent time researching at many archives and key Hemingway sites. How did you translate your findings into a narrative form? 

Yes, I had quite an amazing itinerary, travelling to the South of France, Paris, Chicago, Key West and Havana. By the time I did the travelling, the plot was already laid out, so it wasn’t so much a question of translating the material into narrative, it was more about getting the atmosphere right and picking up on some of the details that could only be found in situ. 

What drew you to writing about Ernest Hemingway and his four wives?

As I began my research, it struck me that Hemingway’s letters to his wives were tonally very different from his taciturn fiction. His billet-doux to Hadley, Pauline, Martha and Mary were in fact extraordinarily warm – almost sentimental. That’s what hooked me. What must these women have been like to inspire a man like Ernest Hemingway to write letters such as those, to Kitty Kat, Small Friend, Picklepot and Lovebug? 

How did agents and publishers respond to your pitch for the book?

Positive, and it was a relief! Particularly because Hemingway is of course not as much read here as in the US, so I wondered if there would be an appetite outside of academia.

Did you ever think of doing a biography? 

No. I was conscious that Bernice Kert’s group biography The Hemingway Women was a very fine biography, which didn’t need revising. And I thought a novel would open up a different kind of conversation. In a novel you can show and explore certain aspects of a life in fiction that one can’t necessarily do within the empirical limits of biography.

The book walks a fine line between fiction and non-fiction. How easy was it to combine historic research and your imagination when writing?

It was certainly a challenge. I wanted it to be as accurate as I could make it, but then I needed a certain amount of license to make it a dramatic narrative in which the characters felt true. I tried as much as possible to make drama out of the real events rather than inventing them.

All of the characters are based on real people, aside from Harry Cuzzemano, who is an amalgamation of Hemingway fans, biographers, obsessives – and me, of course! I needed the Cuzzemano figure because by the end of Hemingway’s life he’d estranged so many of his friends that my cast of characters between 1926 and 1961 had really dwindled, and I needed a linking character.

Of the four wives, which perspective was the most challenging to write? 

Martha Gellhorn’s, because she is most well known out of all four women, and I wanted to do her justice and get her out of Hem’s shadow while still writing a book in which Hemingway is the linking theme. I think she would bristle at the thought of being included in a novel called Mrs Hemingway – but she does do quite a lot of that bristling in the novel itself.

Mrs Hemingway is published by Picador.

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Image courtesy of Picador