The memoir of a recovering alcoholic and writer, blessed and cursed with the name Hemingway, who looks back in mid-life to contemplate the one thing that she has returned to again and again, from childhood to the present, whether sick or healthy, the passion that has comforted and sustained her always: fishing.
This is an autobiography by a granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway that draws heavily on her lifelong passion for fishing. Fishing is more than just a metaphor for Lorian Hemingway; it is a psychic barometer, the activity that tells her whether she is healthy or not. For most of her adult life Lorian has battled alcoholism; she is a recovering alcoholic now. And from childhood Lorian has fished. As a girl she fished with a cane pole for catfish in the red clay waters of the Mississippi. As a young woman she began deep-sea fishing in the Florida Keys with her grandfather's younger brother, Leicester, and she embraced Papa's legend wholeheartedly, drinking as hard as he did. As she says, "I fished alcoholically, brutally, obsessively." Her identification with her grandfather's fishing exploits was so complete that she actually thought he was pointing the way for her, something she now regards as alcoholic psychosis.
Lorian takes responsibility for her alcoholism, but acknowledges that she probably wouldn't have attempted suicide by marlin fishing if she had had a different last name. She eventually realized - others had pointed it out to her, most knowingly a fellow fisherman when she was fishing Papa's waters in Michigan - that she was an alcoholic. She stopped drinking and around the same time discovered fly-fishing. Fishing remains important to her, so much so that she regards the frequency of her fly-fishing as evidence that she has recovered from alcoholism.
