A chance encounter in Spain in 1959 brought young Irish reporter Valerie Danby-Smith face to face with Ernest Hemingway. The interview was awkward and brief, but before it ended something had clicked into place. For the next two years, Valerie devoted her life to Hemingway and his wife, Mary, traveling with them through beloved old haunts in Spain and France and living with them during the tumultuous final months in Cuba. In name a personal secretary, but in reality a confidante and sharer of the great man’s secrets and sorrows, Valerie literally came of age in the company of one of the greatest literary lions of the twentieth century.

Five years after his death, Valerie became a Hemingway herself when she married the writer’s estranged son Gregory. Now, at last, she tells the story of the incredible years she spent with this extravagantly talented and tragically doomed family.

In prose of brilliant clarity and stinging candor, Valerie evokes the magic and the pathos of Papa Hemingway’s last years. Swept up in the wild revelry that always exploded around Hemingway, Valerie found herself dancing in the streets of Pamplona, cheering bullfighters at Valencia, careening around hairpin turns in Provence, and savoring the panorama of Paris from her attic room in the Ritz. But it was only when Hemingway threatened to commit suicide if she left that she realized how troubled the aging writer was–and how dependent he had become on her.

In Cuba, Valerie spent idyllic days and nights typing the final draft of A Moveable Feast, even as Castro’s revolution closed in. After Hemingway shot himself, Valerie returned to Cuba with his widow, Mary, to sort through thousands of manuscript pages and smuggle out priceless works of art. It was at Ernest’s funeral that Valerie, then a researcher for Newsweek, met Hemingway’s son Gregory–and again a chance encounter drastically altered the course of her life. Their twenty-one-year marriage finally unraveled as Valerie helplessly watched her husband succumb to the demons that had plagued him since childhood.

From lunches with Orson Welles to midnight serenades by mysterious troubadours, from a rooftop encounter with Castro to numbing hospital vigils, Valerie Hemingway played an intimate, indispensable role in the lives of two generations of Hemingways. This memoir, by turns luminous, enthralling, and devastating, is the account of what she enjoyed, and what she endured, during her astonishing years of living as a Hemingway.

“It is one of the best books on Hemingway that I have read, and it has material to be found nowhere else on Ernest, Mary, and Greg Hemingway.”
–NORMAN MAILER

“Valerie Hemingway is, with Hemingway’s only surviving son, the last witness to have a precious, intimate knowledge of the family. Her account of Ernest’s last years and of the tragic aftermath of his suicide is absolutely riveting: essential reading for anyone interested in the curse of fame.”
–JEFFREY MEYERS, author of Hemingway: A Biography

“This is the best, and best written, of all the reminiscences of Ernest Hemingway, in part because its adventurous author, Valerie Hemingway, is such an absorbing character herself. For once, the great artist, the hero, and the fool seem to be the same person; and the long list of fascinating people in his train are seen with rare frankness.”
–TOM MCGUANE

“Running with the Bulls is hot to the touch. I was not a little dumbfounded that Valerie Hemingway endured and survived the events of her life to write this improbably skillful memoir that frequently made me wish to climb a mountain and sit on a friendly glacier. The author’s life with the Hemingways is utterly compelling, and we must praise her for her gifts in giving us the most lucid look yet written at this haunted family.”
–JIM HARRISON

“This is a startling, complicated book . . . fresh, trenchant and intimate and revealing, yet sweet-spirited . . . told by a woman with a wonderful voice of her own.”
–DAVID QUAMMEN

Valerie Hemingway is a freelance writer and editor. She lives in Bozeman, Montana.

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