The Paris Wife by Paula McLain, fortuitously combined with Midnight in Paris, directed by Woody Allen

Warning: contains spoilers!

I recently saw Woody Allen’s newest movie, the delightful Midnight in Paris. Owen Wilson’s portrayal of Gil, a writer visiting Paris who gets transported nightly to Paris between the World Wars, is charming and engaging.  Wilson is clearly the character that Woody Allen played in his own movies when younger. My enjoyment of the movie was increased greatly by the fact that I had recently read Paula McLain’s excellent A Paris Wife,  historical fiction told from the point of view of Ernest Hemingway’s first wife Hadley. Gil encounters Hemingway and many of his literary and artistic cohorts on his time-traveling nightly journeys. Since I had just read a fictionalized but historically accurate version of the same time period with many of the same characters, I had a much better idea of what the movie was trying to portray. A happy confluence of two of my favorite pastimes: watching movies and reading!