The inspiration behind Everybody Behaves Badly…
I’ve always been obsessed with The Sun Also Rises, which was Hemingway’s debut novel. Released in 1926, it branded the Lost Generation and its pages were filled with louche decadence. Several years ago, I was looking at a photo of young Hemingway sitting around a cafe table with a handful of comrades, and next to him was an alluring, coquettish, fashionably thin woman. I did some light research and learned that her name was Lady Duff Twysden, and that she was the real-life inspiration behind Lady Brett Ashley, the glamorous, anguished femme fatale in The Sun Also Rises. I dug deeper, and it turned out that Hemingway had based all of Sun’s characters on real people; he lifted their backgrounds in detail and recorded for posterity much of their bad behavior in his novel. I looked for a book that compellingly documented the backstory of The Sun Also Rises, and none existed. So I wrote it instead. And the photo that first inspired the project now adorns the cover of Everybody Behaves Badly.

First Hemingway book I read…
The Old Man and the Sea when I was 12, and I still remember how transporting it was. It was almost like you could feel the hot sun and smell the sea while you were reading it. Then I read The Sun Also Rises a year or two later, and was transfixed by his depiction of 1920s expat Paris — and by Lady Brett in particular. She is one of several female characters in modern American literature who epitomize mysterious allure; Holly Golightly from Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s is another. I studied the hell out of these ladies, trying to crack their code. I still find them beguiling.

F. Scott Fitzgerald vs Hemingway — whom I would rather sit next to at dinner…
Ohhhh… this is a really hard question, and it is forcing me to reveal a deep, dark secret: I am actually totally in love with F. Scott Fitzgerald. I even used to dress up — heels, lipstick, jaunty fedora — when I went to his archive at Princeton; how ridiculous is that? He was, by all reports, charming, alive, funny, terribly clever… and utterly loyal. I’m mad about him. But he might also have been a simply terrible dinner companion, because he drank so much — sometimes into oblivion. Hemingway, on the other hand, held his booze and could command a table for hours. In 1920s Paris, he became an “overwhelming prize” at social gatherings, as one of his fellow expats put it. He was a deep listener, which is always compelling in a dinner party companion. “If you knew all about roses, he would talk to you about roses until he knew everything you knew,” one of his friends told me. “He’d smile at you encouragingly and ask you questions. It was very flattering to be listened to like that.” But I think I would have been intimidated by Hemingway. So I choose Scott.

One unsung writer of the Lost Generation…
I think all of those guys are pretty “sung” — what generation of writers gets more attention? Although I think too few people read the work of poet Archibald MacLeish or writer John Dos Passos these days. Also, no one really thinks of Dorothy Parker as “Lost Generation” because she was mostly across the Atlantic, whooping it up at the Algonquin in New York, but she hung with the Hemingway crowd too and had serious literary aspirations. Like Hemingway, I feel like everyone knows who she is today, but too few people have actually read her work. I love her stories “Big Blonde” and “The Standard of Living.”