Gloria then resurfaces, realising that it didn’t matter whether Ernest had understood them or not. Though Gregory, for the most part, tries to repress or contain the Gloria within, there’s a late glimmer of hope when their eyes land on the newly released The Garden of Eden, a controversial, posthumous 1986 novel by their father, in which characters experiment with gender fluidity. The transformations between Gregory and Gloria over the years are handled with equal care: as with the titular character of Virginia Woolf’s sex-swapping tale Orlando, this young Hemingway moves from “he” to “she” effortlessly, and if “Gregory” dominates much of the narrative, you can feel the pulse of “Gloria” throughout, haunting the male pronoun and beating between the lines. Franklin doesn’t shy away from a father whom the real Gregory labelled a “gin-soaked, abusive monster”, nor from affording him sparks of humanity. He’s depicted telling his children how to be men: he’s temperamental, often angry, but occasionally gentle and kind. Papa himself is a side-character here, though his mythos casts a long shadow. The Broken Places wears its extensive biographical research lightly. (They diverged in becoming a doctor, not a full-time writer, though the family illness of alcoholism would eventually cost them their medical licence.) Like any good Hemingway hero, Gregory travelled the world, hunting and fishing, and like Ernest himself, they were diagnosed with manic depression.
From the tumultuous ’30s to the end of the 20th century, the reader is taken on a serpentine journey, punctuated by rejection and resilience, despair and hope. In his moving debut novel, The Broken Places, Russell Franklin tells the story of Ernest Hemingway’s youngest child, who was known variously as Gregory or Gloria, and lived from 1931–2001.
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