Publication Date December 2025 

For Thee is a first-person fiction memoir of Pauline Pfeiffer, Ernest Hemingway’s second wife. In 1925, she sails to France when she is awarded a plum assignment as a fashion journalist to cover the Paris runways for Vogue magazine. Given her wealth and sophistication, she is quickly adopted by the ex-pat set dominating post-WWI Paris, including writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, and a young writer named Ernest Hemingway, who has yet to make his mark on the world but will do so very soon with his first novel, The Sun Also Rises. A devout Catholic when she meets Ernest, Pauline rejects the moral tenets of her childhood and faith for a man who ten years later will edit her out of his life with the same casual disdain as he would a badly written sentence.

Pauline and Ernest marry in 1927 and set up their home base in Key West, a sleepy little fishing village in the Florida Keys. They have two children that they park in the care of others as they feed the constant wanderlust characterizing their marriage. They hunt in Montana, socialize in New York, safari in Africa, and have droves of people visit them at their house on Whitehead Street in Key West. Pauline’s trust fund and the generosity of her family fund this extravagant lifestyle.

Eventually, Pauline begins to figure negatively in Ernest’s fiction. She tries to ignore Ernest’s more blatant affairs and is largely successful until Ernest meets the journalist Martha Gellhorn. If Gellhorn is determined to cover the Spanish Civil War, Ernest is determined to covet Gellhorn. Ernest and Martha join up in Madrid, and their affair is played out over the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War. Pauline and Ernest divorce in 1940. The ink on their divorce decree is barely dry before Ernest marries Martha Gellhorn, a marriage that lasts five years. Ernest and Pauline’s post-divorce relationship is acrimonious as they fight constantly about their children and money. In 1951, a fight with Ernest over the legal troubles of their son Gregory causes an adrenal tumor on her pituitary to burst, and she dies of acute shock the next day while in surgery at the age of fifty-six. Almost ten years later, Hemingway’s third suicide attempt is successful. He puts a loaded shotgun into his mouth and pulls the trigger.