Download Running with the Bulls: My Years with the Hemingways AudioBook Free
A chance come across 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 through the tumultuous final months in Cuba. In name a personal secretary, however in reality a confidante and sharer of the great mans secrets and sorrows, Valerie literally came old together with one of the biggest literary lions of the twentieth century. Five years after his death, Valerie became a Hemingway herself when she married the writers estranged son Gregory. Now, finally, she tells the storyline 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 Hemingways 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 behalf. In Cuba, Valerie spent idyllic days and nights typing the final draft of an Movable Feast, even as Castros 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 artwork. It had been at Ernests funeral that Valerie, a researcher for Newsweek, met Hemingways son Gregory - and again a chance come across 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. 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 many years of living as a Hemingway.