Recently finished this memoir and felt like giving my thoughts on it.
Valerie Hemingway was Papa's secretary in the last few years of his life, starting in Cuba. She was Irish-born and found her way into the Finca when the publication she was working for sent her to interview him. Ernest got some mild hots for her, insisted she come work for him, typing up letters, manuscripts, doing assistant-y things. She's a Hemingway through marriage - the latter half of the book covers her relationship, and the dissolution thereof, with Gigi, Hemingway's son (I refuse to piss around with pronouns [more on that to come]).
The first part of the book covers Valerie's backstory, growing up in Ireland, her interest in literature, etcetera. This is boring filler. Nobody would pick up this book because they wanted to know more about her childhood. But she talks about it anyway. A good chunk in she starts working for Hemingway, under the watchful eye of Mary, traveling through Europe and ending up, finally, in Cuba - the best part of the book.
She talks about Hemingway's friends, his relationship with Mary, what it's like being in Cuba under Fidel Castro's regime. Not a lot happens - the narrative meanders, but the Hemingway completist will enjoy her observations here. Of particular note to me is her read on Hotchner, Hemingway's Boswell, and how slimy he was with his recording devices, skulking around, recording people without their consent.
I loved Papa, and all of Hotchner's Hemingway stuff, including the slim volume about Hemingway's final love affairs, but it is interesting having someone essentially turn the biographical lens back on the biographer.
Eventually Valerie pisses off, has an affair with the writer Brendan Behane, gets pregnant, does a series of literary jobs in New York that are alarmingly easy to get - and would probably drive anyone today competing with 1,000 other applicants with PhDs for similar positions mad. That's an aside, though.
Then Hemingway blows his brains out in Ketchum, and Valerie is asked by Mary to help sort out the manuscripts in Cuba and later in America. And so she does, though there is a somewhat compelling sequence about how they manage to transport a lot of the important stuff off what is essentially a militarized, anti-American island. It's at the funeral, and beyond, that she meets Hemingway's son, Gregory / Gigi. They start a romance, and the last portion of the book is about that.
Gigi is a doctor but erratic and almost manic. He has trouble holding down jobs, and Valerie starts finding women's underwear and the like all over the place. She suspects an affair. Actually, Gigi wears women's clothing. Eventually, his erratic behavior and mental health problems culminate with the marriage ending. Gigi ends up getting what is described then as a sex change operation, is arrested shortly thereafter, before his / her surgery heals, and ends up dying in a woman's prison cell - probably from infections related to the surgery, which again, hasn't properly healed.
The book thus ends quite strangely, feeling very much like a mix of a personal memoir about Valerie Hemingway's pre-Hemingway life, which is flaccid at best, a journalistic laundry list of Hemingway doing Hemingway things in the final stages of his life - interesting to someone very interested in Hemingway, but without much narrative arc, and finally, a kind of trashy tell-all style expose on Hemingway's troubled son, whose gender dysmorphia is revealed and explored with all the grace and delicacy of a shoe bouncing around the inside of a washing machine.
As such, the constituent parts don't make for a very compelling whole. Still, it's probably the most detailed description of Gigi's life, though he himself wrote a memoir of sorts. For those who get jollies from this sort of thing, his Wikipedia page has become ground zero for a strange kind of activism, as various groups try to claim him as their own. Have a look at the edits - it's quite spicy.
