Wednesday Journal: "Strange Tribe"

In my attempt to keep my articles I write updated on here, I figured I would post my first article for the Wednesday Journal. This was my favorite article I've ever written for an internship or for the paper at school. I enjoyed talking to John Hemingway and finding out more about Ernest and Ernest's son. They come from a "strange tribe" as John told me.



Surviving as a Hemingway
To write memoir about his dad, grandson had to first understand Ernest

By ANGELA ROMANO
Contributing Reporter

Having a world-renowned last name hasn't been easy for John Hemingway.

The much-written-about troubles of his Nobel- and Pulitzer-winning grandfather echoed in the life of Gregory/Gloria Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway's youngest child and John's father. It's his dad's woes - the lesser-known Hemingway tragedy of all-out gender confusion complicated by family legacies of alcoholism, drug abuse, mental illness and failed marriages - that for decades concerned John Hemingway.

"I needed to understand my dad. And to understand him, I had to understand my grandfather and the kind of man he had been," says John Hemingway, who took more than half a decade after his dad's death to sort through the strong links between the two men.

Gloria Hemingway, a transgender woman, died in 2001 at a detention center in Florida, facing charges for indecent exposure. Gregory Hemingway, a doctor, had been married four times and was the father of eight. He had undergone sex reassignment surgery at age 64, six years before he died of heart disease.

In 2007, John Hemingway published Strange Tribe, a rare Hemingway memoir not primarily about Ernest. This Thursday night, he will be at the Hemingway Museum in Oak Park, reading from this work and signing copies of it.

John Hemingway, 49, is a novelist, poet and translator who lives in Montreal with his wife and two children. He was born in Miami. This visit to his grandfather's birthplace will be his first to Oak Park.

Best known recently for his "Uncle Gus" short story in the revival last summer of The Saturday Evening Post, Hemingway also is the author of short stories and articles in newspapers and magazines in the United States, Italy and Spain. His work has appeared in El Mundo, Corriere della Sera, Fogged Clarity, and Home.

Since childhood, he's struggled to understand unhealthy family dynamics.

"My father never spoke of my grandfather," Hemingway said in a phone interview last week. "My father and my grandfather didn't communicate the last years of his life, so I've spent much of my life trying to figure out why."

With a mom who had her own bouts with mental illness, he grew up being shuffled from one relative's house to the next. Lack of stability in home life and a frustration with his dad caused Hemingway to pack his belongings after graduating from UCLA and move to Italy. He stayed in Europe for 22 years.

Hemingway's younger half-sister, Lorian, whom he says also struggled with family alienation, wrote a memoir, Walk on Water, in 1999 and several novels, one of which covers her own battle with alcoholism. She now lives in Seattle with her husband.

For all he's inherited, Hemingway vows not to let his family's troubles get the best of him. His blog, which touches on both work and personal matters, has its light-hearted moments. And it's also the place where he shared how he got the title for his book, an insight into the complex relationship between his father and grandfather:

"I think that my dad was around 11 or 12, and he had put on a pair of his mother's nylons. Ernest walked into the room, stared at him for a moment, shocked, then walked out again without saying a word. But a few days later, he looked at Gregory and said: 'Gigi, [pronounced with a hard G] you and I come from a strange tribe.'"