Mariel Hemingway was only 6 years old when she learned how to mix cocktails and pour wine as a survival mechanism to keep her parents from arguing. In two new autobiographies, the California native and granddaughter of novelist Ernest Hemingway says she spent her childhood carefully navigating through a “minefield” of alcoholism, arguing, drug addiction, mental illness and suicide.
Seven of her family members have committed suicide. Her famous grandfather died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1961, and her supermodel sister Margaux overdosed on barbiturates in 1996. Her elder sister, “Muffet,” whom she described as “brilliant, beautiful and superfun,” suffered from schizophrenia.
But 10 years after Miss Hemingway became the family bartender, she emerged in 1979 as a fresh face in Woody Allen’s “Manhattan.” She went on to have a successful Hollywood career alongside stars such as Christopher Reeve, John Candy and Kurt Russell. Despite many years of clinging to “perfectionism” and assuming the role of caregiver and peacemaker as a way to focus and survive, she now says, “You have to turn the conversation on yourself” to find true happiness.
At 53, Miss Hemingway is following in the footsteps of her grandfather, whose many books transformed literary style around the world. Her two new memoirs are easily relatable accounts of her challenges for teenagers called “Invisible Girl” and an adult version, “Out Came the Sun,” a title reminiscent of Hemingway’s 1926 classic, “The Sun Also Rises.”
The actress turned author said she wrote the books to help others cope with loneliness. Despite the stigma of mental illness, “these stories are really common,” she said.
The first step, she said, is to have the courage to talk about the “commonality for dysfunction and suicide.”
Learning to be a strong individual and looking inward instead of outward is the way to find the answers, she said.
“My life was looking for someone, something, someplace, some guru, some food program, some exercise routine that would help me, but it was only on the outside. I realized you have to turn the conversation on yourself, and that it wasn’t about someone fixing you from the outside or getting validation from the outside. It means at some point we get to the place [with] our own inner voice to find the right direction to go,” she told The Washington Times in a Saturday telephone interview.
She stressed the importance of individuality as a coping mechanism for people struggling with mental illness and as a reminder that conformity has compelled society to persecute and ridicule mental illness.
“If we’re really clear and honest, it’s the most stigmatized illness of all, the most embarrassing for a family. When there were the [Salem] witch hunts, I’m sure some of those women were kind, loving and moral, but some of them had manic behavior. So we’ve misinterpreted what’s happened throughout history, and we’ve tried to call it something else — when someone was actually suffering from mental illness.”
Miss Hemingway wrote the companion young adult component to her book to reach out to teenagers going through the same isolating problems she suffered at that age.
She said her experiences with family arguments and depression made her “hypervigilant” about using self-determination to ensure that her own two daughters found happiness.
“I believed it was my job to break this pattern that had been created,” she said. “I believe that genetic patterns are there, but stronger than genetics are energetic patterning by saying we’re breaking the cycle. If my kids are having problems, I want it to be their problems. I believe, by making healthy choices, we can break these patterns and say, ’I don’t buy it. I’m not allowing this to be the case.’”
But having seen the power of Hollywood and the media from the inside, Miss Hemingway said, young women today face challenges from external factors even outside their families, such as airbrushed magazine covers and “reality television” standards of physical beauty.
She also conceded her own contributions.
“I was probably part of the problem,” she said, reflecting on the movies and magazine articles in which she was featured. “We are all not cookie-cutter people, and we’re not supposed to be sizes 1 and 2. We are supposed to be the best of ourselves. Being beautiful is more than being like someone else.”
Miss Hemingway said one of her greatest hopes is to convince young people that drugs and alcohol are not answers to problems and typically only enhance depression. She said she has been haunted throughout her life by the myth that her grandfather was a good writer because he was always drinking. Rather, he used writing as a way to avoid drinking.
“If I do nothing else in my life, I want to dispel the myth that great writers are great drinkers,” she said. “It’s such nonsense. Here’s the truth about that: My grandfather never wrote drunk. He made it his absolute commandment. He always wrote early in the morning because, invariably, he knew that was a recipe for disaster. He drank because there was a lot of pain in his life. All of his stories from his childhood, he sort of dealt with them in his books because it wasn’t that time or generation — the self-help generation.”
She said she has deep respect for people who stand by their loved ones suffering from mental illness and offered advice for friends and family members to focus inward as well.
“That’s probably one of the hardest things to deal with,” she said. “That’s tougher than any of it, being a caretaker for anyone who suffers mental illness or anyone who has a physical illness that creates depression. So the people out there that have to care for someone, I just want them to know they are not alone [and] my heart goes out to them. Please get help, please put yourself first sometimes. It’s really good to take care of yourself — because you won’t be able to take care of that person unless you take care of yourself, energize and feel good about who you are.”
• Jeffrey Scott Shapiro can be reached at jshapiro@washingtontimes.com.
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