The Wildest Sun and Hemingway’s Influence: A Guest Post by Asha Lemmie

When I decided to write my sophomore novel, The Wildest Sun, I knew that I wanted to write a coming-of-age story that delves into the perilous bridge between adolescence and true adulthood. I sought to create a complex heroine with ambition to spare, and I found her in Delphine Auber. Delphine is a young Parisienne who was raised on her troubled mother’s stories of the alleged father she’s never known: Ernest Hemingway. Delphine is deeply committed to the idea of winning his approval, both as a daughter and as the great writer that she seeks to become. Fleeing from personal tragedy at the close of WWII, she sets out the journey she’s long dreamed of and crosses the globe to find him.

I chose Hemingway as a central theme of this novel for several reasons. Firstly, I think it’s impossible to say that I haven’t been influenced by his writing. Though I’ve read him extensively ever since I was a young girl, I would have been touched by his pen either way, simply because his writing has had such a monumental effect on modern American literature. Even if I had managed to escape high school and college without reading The Sun Also Rises (my personal favorite), For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea or Hills Like White Elephants, it is impossible to imagine that I would have been able to avoid reading any author’s work who’d been heavily influenced by Hemingway. I have always admired his pristine, minimalist prose and his ability to craft palpable tension in a matter of moments. His conjuring of vivid, immersive settings with scant language is a skill that I will spend my life attempting to master. I was absolutely inspired by his writing when I was crafting The Wildest Sun.

But I was also inspired more broadly by his life. He was considered a complex, controversial figure, even in his own lifetime. While The Wildest Sun is very much not and was never intended to be a Hemingway biography, the era in which Hemingway lived was undeniably fascinating. By following the arc of his life and generation through Delphine’s eyes, I was able to explore one of the most tumultuous and influential periods in history. War, art, social progression, not to mention the settings! Paris, Havana…Hemingway was not a man who stayed put his entire life, and on Delphine’s journey she treads many similar pathways, but makes discoveries all her own.

Hemingway was an adventurer with a wild spirit, and The Wildest Sun at its heart is an epic that captures that essence. It’s the story of a girl who goes to extraordinary lengths to find love, acceptance, and purpose. Her ambition to become a great writer begins with Hemingway, but naturally evolves into a true passion. Words give us the power to shape worlds, to find solace, to connect us to whatever it is that we feel we’re missing—we are rarely as alone as we think we are. Words give us the power to tell our own stories, and if we’re truly lucky, they give us immorality. Delphine discovers all of this, just as I did when I was young.

The Wildest Sun is a story for those who are fascinated by history, Hemingway and the nexus of creative passion, but it is also a story for anyone who has ever needed a reason to accept themselves, not just for who they could be, but for who they are, and who they have been.