Out Came the Sun: Overcoming the Legacy of Mental Illness, Addiction, and Suicide in My Family.

Hays, Peter L.

Out Came the Sun: Overcoming the Legacy of Mental Illness, Addiction, and Suicide in My Family. By Mariel Hemingway. New York: Regan Arts, 2015. 288 pp. $26.95.

This is a memoir by Mariel Hemingway, a voyage of spiritual discovery, and it tells us very little about her grandfather, Ernest. The title may be a distant homage to The Sun Also Rises, but seems more likely an affirmation of the authors finding peace with herself at 54. Mariel, the youngest daughter of Jack (Bumby) and Puck (Byra Whittlesey), was born six months after Ernest committed suicide in 1961. Her older sisters are Muffet (Joan) and Margaux (nee Margot).

She describes her parents as alcoholics who argued constantly and threw bottles at each other. Puck was sharply critical, and so Jack withdrew, often going out hiking or fly fishing to avoid family tensions. Jack hated his job as a stockbroker for Merrill Lynch in San Francisco, and as soon as income from his father allowed, they moved from California to Ketchum, Idaho. It was only when she was in her teens that Mariel found out that Puck had been married before Jack, to an airman killed in the war. Mariel, who condemns scholars for psychoanalyzing dead Ernest (I plead guilty), speculates that in the dead flyer Puck "had found her Prince Charming, only to have him taken from her. My father arrived on the scene determined to do his best, but who could live up to the standard set by a dead hero?" (93)--the same situation that befalls Sam Evans trying to replace Gordon Shaw in O'Neill's Strange Interlude. Mariel continues psychoanalyzing her family: "Everyone in the family was in an impossible shadow. Margaux was in the shadow of her perfect older sister, Muffet, who was in the shadow of her own mental disarrangement" (93).

Significantly, Mariel repudiates the speculation she announced in the documentary film Running from Crazy (2013), that Jack molested Muffet and Margot. Here she says, "Over the years I have sometimes wondered if there was anything going on behind closed doors that I didn't know about, anything improperly intimate or even sexual. To be clear, I didn't see anything untoward. No one ever said anything to that effect" (51). "My mother ... was cruel to him [Jack] at a basic level. She dismissed him and made him feel smaller.... He turned elsewhere in the family for affection.... But I can't say exactly what it was. It isn't that I won't say. I can't say. I don't know" (51-52). In the film she did say.

In contrast to her parents and sisters, Mariel became--and to a certain extent still is--obsessive compulsive. They made things messy; she would organize and clean. Among the things she would organize would be her body, and chapters relate her various diets, eating compulsions (not unlike sister Margaux, the supermodel, trying to stay slim), and exercise (hiking, rock climbing, yoga). She examines alternative medicines and self-healing therapies, including crystals, mediums, cleansing diets, and Tony Robbins' seminars. There is no index to the book, but there is an appendix, "Resources for Mental Health, Substance Abuse, and Better Living," and under Cancer, which Puck suffered from, there is the Burzynski Clinic Advanced Alternative Cancer Treatment. There is also a section on "Alternative Healing Modalities," including director David Lynch's Loundation and the National Ayurvedic Medical Association.

The writing, as even the few quotations above indicate, is pedestrian. There are even cliches, such as "The sex was amazing" (145). Whatever her grace as an actress, and I have admired her performances, here--even with the help of a co-writer, New Yorker writer Ben Greenman, author of eight books and co-writer of the memoirs of Gene Simmons and Simon Cowell--the prose just clumps along.

She dropped out of high school to film Manhattan with Woody Allen and never completed a formal education. Woody invited her, a teenager, to Paris, and her parents, she says, were enthusiastic that she accompany him. She refused, appalled that they were pushing her into a sexual relationship with a much older man. She talks about her film roles, her breast implants for Star 80 and the nude photos that director Bob Fosse leaked to Playboy, and her co-stars. In contrast to her disorganized, mutually combative family, she found comfort and support among the film crews with which she worked. She examines why she stayed married for twenty-five years to a man with whom she shared very little, Stephen Crisman, a Hard Rock Cafe executive, but does not go deeply into her relationship with her daughters, one of whom, Dree, is also an actress. Where they are now in her life or in their own, she does not say. So, this is not a book to learn anything about Ernest or the Hemingway curse (at least seven family suicides). It is a memoir of a woman who has sought to explore her own mental and physical states.

The book jacket describes Mariel as an Academy-Award nominated actress (for Manhattan), healthy-lifestyle-brand author, mother, and mental health advocate. She has authored, with her partner Bobby Williams, a previous lifestyle book, Running with Nature: Stepping Into the Life You Were Meant to Live. Since acting jobs have been sparse lately, one could surmise that this book is a way to seek income, as was the previous one, another of the popular lifestyle books on the market; she mentions no employment for her "healthy lifestyle" partner Bobby Williams.

Beyond fact checking, book reviews are largely subjective, and so I will be. I'm old enough to be Mariel's father, and I'm put off by the New Age, alternative medicine focus of much of the book (which says more about me than about her). I do not believe in the healing help of crystals or mediums, and slavish dedication to any diet I find tinged with fanaticism. This is a book about a very self-absorbed woman who is capitalizing on her grandfather's and her own fame. If you're into self-help, healthy living books, read this. If not, take In Our Time with you the next time you go for a hike or go camping.

Peter L. Hays

University of California, Davis