Strange Tribe: A Family Memoir by John Hemingway

From the Publisher

A memoir that is at once fascinating, compelling, and heartbreaking, Strange Tribe reveals the peculiar dynamics between Ernest Hemingway and his youngest son, Gregory, the author's father.
Gregory tried to live up to Ernest's macho reputation throughout his life. Yet as a cross-dresser and (ultimately) a transsexual, Gregory was obsessed with his "female half," and he struggled with personal demons until his death at the Women's Correctional Facility of the Miami-Dade County Jail in 2001. The media referred to Gregory as the "black sheep" of the Hemingway family.
Gregory's son, however, wasn't so sure. In this wonderfully crafted narrative, John Hemingway reveals how Ernest himself felt a special kinship with Gregory, and how the two men (who both suffered from bipolar illness and shared a fascination with androgyny) were actually two sides of the same coin. Featuring several newly published letters between Ernest and Gregory, Strange Tribe reveals their unknown similarities. In the end, John comes to feel that in his father's lifelong struggles, Gregory most exemplified Ernest's ideal of grace under pressure.
This is also John's coming-of-age story - of what it was like growing up in Miami and Montana with his father and his schizophrenic mother, how it took him years to deal with the pain their illnesses caused him, and how he ultimately fled the burden of the Hemingway name and family history, one marked by multiple suicides, by moving to Italy in 1984. Now able for the first time to confront the legacy of his troubled father and famous grandfather, John also examines his own life and role as a father. Along the way, his honest, piercing, and uniquely revealing storyforces us to reevaluate the work of Ernest Hemingway, one of the most important literary icons of the past hundred years, whose persona continues to loom darkly over the often-troubled lives of his descendants.

Publishers Weekly

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 (his mother was schizophrenic) 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. (May)

Jan Brue Enright - Library Journal

The myth of Ernest Hemingway is so large, so outrageous, so macho, so wild, that it is no wonder there is a great deal of interest in the writer's life and family almost 50 years after his death. Ernest's grandson John (child of Ernest's youngest son, Gregory) shares his own perspective on the family. Although he never knew his grandfather, he uses previously unpublished letters between Ernest and his father to explore the pair's tumultuous love/hate relationship. Gregory struggled with gender identity (it has been theorized that Ernest had a similar struggle) and ended his life a cross-dresser. John spent his childhood shuffling between his schizophrenic mother and his bipolar father. Add alcohol, infidelity, and money problems to the mix, and imagine the ensuing mayhem. While the younger Hemingway shows a talent for holding readers' interest, his story is an old one. And while his examination of his relationship with his father holds up well, his speculation about his father's relationship with his grandfather resonates a bit less authentically. Recommended for public libraries with strong Hemingway interest.

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