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Events
Visiting Writer John Hemingway’s Book Talk about His Memoir Strange Tribe, an Exploration of Growing up Hemingway
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
7:00 pm @ Wexner Center Film and Video Theater.
Free and Open to the Public.
As revealed in, Strange Tribe, Hemingway had a difficult childhood: his father suffered from bipolar disorder and his mother, Alice Thomas, is schizophrenic. Hemingway spent his early years being shuffled from one home to another and dealing with his dysfunctional family. He eventually enrolled at UCLA to study history and Italian. After graduating, he moved to Italy as a way of distancing himself from his troubled family background. One of the unresolved questions for him was how his father, a cross-dresser and transsexual, might fit with the public image of his grandfather as an icon of male masculinity. What Hemingway discovered was that both men, besides being bipolar, were also fascinated by androgyny. The macho myth surrounding his grandfather was, in fact, only half the story.
A reviewer for Publisher's Weekly writes,
In Strange Tribe, the author, grandson of Nobel Prize winner Ernest Hemingway, and son of his youngest child, Gregory, investigates the similarities between these two paternal figures and seeks to find his place in their "strange tribe" with a "famous last name." Sure to excite fans and Hemingway scholars, the book does much to complicate Ernest's image as a macho man, cataloguing both his dependence on women and his gender-bending proclivities. However, the true heart of the book is in exploring the Hemingways' failure as parents and how the familial disposition toward manic-depression created a genetic "Hemingway curse." The author, having escaped the disease, paints his father and grandfather in blunt strokes as loving and generous men who had little understanding of their psychological disorder; the most endearing and comprehensive portrait is of his father's struggles as a transvestite son of a "pillar of American manhood." When describing his own parents' early neglect and, later, his partial reconciliation with his father, the book focuses on the author's generation of Hemingways; but mostly the book is intent upon setting the record straight about Ernest, his youngest son and their similarities. John Hemingway writes honestly and is a sympathetic scrutinizer of this complicated and famous man, the family he parented and the myths to which his writing has given birth.
Co-sponsored with the Ohio State Sexuality Studies Program, the Institute for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities, and the Wexner Center, this talk is open to the public. Copies of John Hemingway's book will be available for sale and signing after his presentation.
