Mariel Hemingway starred in Woody Allen’s Manhattan in 1979. But it is her famous surname that always precedes her.
Mariel Hemingway was born into the family of legendary author Ernest Hemingway, author of such classics as:
The Sun Also Rises (1926)
A Farewell to Arms (1929)
For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
The Old Man and the Sea (1951)
Mariel’s grandfather Ernest Hemingway is also famous for committing suicide with a shotgun in 1961. Mariel Hemingway also lost her supermodel sister Margaux to suicide in 1996. In all seven of her family members have taken their own lives.
Now Mariel Hemingway is speaking out about this family curse in a book called Out Came the Sun.
Her publisher describes the book:
“She opens her eyes. The room is dark. She hears yelling, smashed plates, and wishes it was all a terrible dream. But it isn’t. This is what it was like growing up as a Hemingway. In this deeply moving, searingly honest new memoir, actress and mental health icon Mariel Hemingway shares in candid detail the story of her troubled childhood in a famous family haunted by depression, alcoholism, illness, and suicide.
“Born just a few months after her grandfather, Ernest Hemingway, shot himself, it was Mariel’s mission as a girl to escape the desperate cycles of severe mental health issues that had plagued generations of her family. Surrounded by a family tortured by alcoholism (both parents), depression (her sister Margaux), suicide (her grandfather and four other members of her family), schizophrenia (her sister Muffet), and cancer (mother), it was all the young Mariel could do to keep her head.”
Perhaps the “keep her head” comment was not thought out well. Ernest Hemingway blew his brains out.
Nonetheless, Mariel Hemingway tackles the topics of depression and suicide, as well as other family demons head-on. She writes.
“I am a Hemingway, and to me, that means that I have a ticket to understanding a world of darkness, of courage, of sadness, of excitement, and — at times — of complete lunacy. And yet, other people with other names feel these things too. It may just be that they don’t have an American myth to which they can connect themselves.”