Q: You profile Ernest Hemingway and his mistress Martha Gellhorn, a literary giant in her own right, as they tried to tell the story of the civil war.
The book expanded to a wider issue: Who tells the truth, and what is the truth? What about not just telling the truth and living it, but also being truthful with the others in your life? These issues were really important for these couples. But when you do that, you run the danger of projecting your own self, your own aspirations and fears, onto a conflict in which you don't really have a personal stake. Some kept seeing it as a war that was a forerunner to the ideological conflict between the left and the right and a way to stop Hitler, which it was. They were projecting what they wanted it to be. They weren't Spanish, and it wasn't their war. There are these people who went to Spain and expected to see something, and they only saw what they expected to see. The original story I intended to write was about people coming to a war from the outside and being different from those in the inside. Q: Your book chronicles how each of these people, most of them outsiders, grappled with the truth of the war and, in some cases, the lies of their own messy personal lives.
In an interview, Vaill talks about the truth, the lies and the path between. New California law: Let teens sleep in on school days