John Hemingway Shares Family Legacy

April 21, 2008

On April 17 Rollins College and the Master of Liberal Studies Program sponsored a reading and discussion by John Hemingway, Earnest Hemingway's grandson. Held at the First Congregational Church on Interlachen Avenue, Hemingway shared excerpts from his book, Strange Tribe: A Family Memoir.

In Strange Tribe, Hemingway reveals the “strange” dynamics between Nobel Prize-winning writer Ernest Hemingway and his third and youngest son, Gregory. Gregory, John’s father, attempted to live up to Ernest’s manly reputation, but as a cross-dresser and (eventually) a transsexual, Gregory was obsessed with having both masculine and feminine characteristics and never lived up to his father’s expectations. Gregory Hemingway died at Miami’s Women’s Correctional Facility in 2001 after being arrested for indecent exposure as Gloria Hemingway, the post-sex-change identity he adopted. This is only one of the incidents in Strange Tribe’s recounting Gregory’s struggle with his identity, and its impact on his son John.

Strange Tribe is a memoir that explores the relationship between fathers and sons in this iconic literary family. John Hemingway shared very personal accounts of his and his father’s legacy as Hemingways living in the larger-than-life shadow of Ernest. John revealed surprising ways that Ernest and Gregory, both suffering from bipolar episodes and both interested in androgyny, were “two sides of the same coin,” a subject that has been explored with great interest by Hemingway critics in the last decade or so of gender studies.

John Hemingway is a writer and translator who currently lives in Canada with his wife, Ornella, and their two children.