The memoir is flawed, no question. Still, it’s interesting to
hear even the carefully guarded observations of Mariel,
the most successful of the Hemingway descendants,
writes Laura Malt Schneiderman

Mental illness, addiction and suicide, especially suicide, course through the Hemingway family tree. Legendary author Ernest Hemingway shot himself in the head in 1961. Ernest’s father shot himself in the head in 1928. Of Ernest’s siblings, one brother died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, and a sister killed herself with an overdose.
Ernest Hemingway had four wives. His first wife’s father committed suicide. From this first wife, Hemingway had a son, who was the father of Mariel Hemingway, the author of this memoir Out Came the Sun: Overcoming the Legacy of Mental Illness, Addiction and Suicide in My Family.
Within Mariel’s immediate family, one sister — the super model Margaux Hemingway — committed suicide by drug overdose. The other sister is mentally ill and unable to function independently.
Hemingway’s parents were unhappily married alcoholics. After they went to bed, leaving the blood and broken glass from their drinking and near-constant fighting, young Mariel would clean up, hoping to erase the signs of dysfunction and discord.
Mariel, the most stable of the family, was nominated for an Academy Award for her turn in Woody Allen’s 1979 film Manhattan, and went on to star in two more critically acclaimed major motion pictures, Personal Best (1982) and Star 80 (1983).
With these facts in mind, it may come as no surprise that Hemingway is a self-described control freak with a dash of obsessive-compulsive behaviour. And that’s all right. What’s not all right is writing a memoir that leaves out the most headline-grabbing parts of one’s life.
The bombshell Hemingway left in the memoir is her relationship with famed director Woody Allen. In the movie Manhattan, a 40-something character played by Allen dates a 17-year-old character played by Hemingway. Real life imitated art: Allen, then 44, took out Hemingway, aged 16, during filming, for talking and joking — dates, more or less.
He also pressured her to come with him to Paris without clarifying the sleeping arrangements. Hemingway excuses Allen: “I had agreed to take a part in his movie where I was playing more sophisticated and more adult, and if that was confusing for me, it was also probably confusing for him.”
She reserves her anger for her parents, who encouraged her to go with Allen. “I felt abandoned and angry,” she writes. In the end, it is she who tells Allen she won’t go to Paris with him, waking him up to deliver the news. His only response is a disoriented “what?” and then leaving by plane the next morning.
This anecdote confirms Allen’s penchant for teenage girls, which was already known. His present wife was about 19 and he 56 when they began an affair. It does not shed light on whether he molested his adopted daughter when she was 7, as his former lover, Mia Farrow has accused him.
The worst that can be said is that Allen likes teenage girls and is not above abusing his power as a director and older man to try to lure them.
On another bombshell Hemingway equivocates. In her 2013 documentary Running From Crazy, she claimed her father abused her sisters. In this memoir she is more circumspect: “Over the years, I have sometimes wondered if there was anything going on behind closed doors that I didn’t know about, anything improperly intimate or even sexual,” she writes, then quickly backtracks, “I didn’t see anything untoward.”
Then she turns the blame onto her audience: “Why, when people hear about discomfort in a family, do they immediately imagine the most taboo acts?”
Maybe her former claim was based on speculation about her father’s loneliness and her sisters’ seeming to compete for his affection. Or, maybe there is something she saw or heard but prefers not to disclose. It’s hard to know.
Likewise, Hemingway holds back details about her sister Margaux.
In this memoir, Margaux is little more than a self-absorbed, out-of-control sibling competitor. Again, that’s OK. It is, after all, Mariel’s memoir, not Margaux’s. But the glossing over of important details can go to extremes. One day, Margot doesn’t come home, and a week later, she’s Margaux, the highest-paid model in the world. Something isn’t being said here.
The memoir keeps silent about other salient facts as well, such as the source of the family income (Hemingway’s father leaves home for days to go fly fishing) and whether and how the family name opened any doors for Margaux or Mariel.
None of this is to say that the book lacks readability. It is strongest when describing Hemingway’s childhood. A companion book, Invisible Girl, spells out Hemingway’s childhood impressions and feelings even more vividly. The reader gets a strong sense of the chaos of the Hemingway family, the disappointments and neediness of its members, and the neglect from which the children suffered. Hemingway comes across as observant and likeable.
The memoir falters as it moves into Hemingway’s years in Hollywood and her failed marriage. Here chapters follow a certain formula: an attention-grabbing line, followed by some rather inconsequential storytelling. She drops names in an attempt to cover up the lack of depth. Chris Sarandon was a dream to work with; Eric Roberts was a pill; and Bob Fosse chased her around a couch to get intimate.
At the end of both Out Came the Sun and Invisible Girl, Hemingway lists phone numbers to call for help with mental health, addiction, suicide and cancer.
The memoir is flawed, no question. Still, it’s interesting to hear even the carefully guarded observations of this, the most successful of the Hemingway descendants. — Pittsburgh Post-Gazette/TNS

Related Story