Out Came The Sun - Overcoming The Legacy of Mental Illness, Addiction, and Suicide In My Family is a 2015 autobiography by Mariel Hemingway. The title makes it sound more like a recovery book than a memoir (misleading you to think Mariel herself was mentally ill, addicted and suicidal, when she is quite strong and resilient) and it's so close to her previous 2003 memoir Finding My Balance, that it's hard not to review them together.
Mariel rose to fame at seventeen with her Academy Award nominated performance in Woody Allen's film Manhattan. Just before that, she appeared in Lipstick opposite her New York Supermodel sister Margaux, and followed Manhattan with starring roles in Personal Best and Star 80 while her sister's acting career fizzled. These roles and several others are detailed along with the struggles of her famous family. Her grandfather, Ernest Hemingway committed suicide, as eventually did Margaux, her older sister. Her parents led a intense and loveless marriage fuelled by alcoholic fights and she talks about dealing with their deaths. Her other sister Joan (nicknamed Muffet) dealt with a lifetime of mental illness, and all this drama led many to refer to the "Hemingway family curse". A daunting task to overcome the implied doom that being in this family carries, Mariel rises above it to meet and marry a restauranteur businessman and raise two girls, all while juggling an acting career. I always liked Mariel, from Manhattan and Star 80 to her TV work. Like Tatum O'Neal or Brooke Shields her career keeps moving on through personal struggles.
This memoir didn't open my eyes or endear me any more than I was, but if you are reading this because you like Mariel, you will enjoy learning more about her and her story. Unvarnished and introspective, it's an honest look at her family dynamic and life so far.
Finding My Balance was written twelve years earlier, but oddly covers the same ground as the new memoir. Structured around her passion for yoga, with each chapter describing a pose then launching off from there, she tells of her being cast in Manhattan, Personal Best and image issues while filming Star 80. Like a blueprint for the new book Out Came The Sun, this memoir contains the same stories and in the same order, including using the same family pictures! Rather than write a new memoir from the first book to present day, she simply expands the same ground with a few more anecdotes, a few affairs not revealed before, and includes more memories from films she has worked on. Heavy on the yoga, it ends with 33 pages of exercises.
If you are interested in reading a Mariel Hemingway memoir, Out Came The Sun is superior, with more to say and a clearer reflection. She has become a mental health advocate and ends the book with a 10 page appendix of resources. Interesting.
2015 / Hardcover / 280 pages
2003 / Hardcover / 229 pages
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