I AM NOT CATHERINE

JEG ER IKKE CATHERINE – I AM NOT CATHERINE

By Mich Vraa

A LUMINOUS, DEEPLY moving novel about a woman who refuses to remain a footnote in someone else’s story. It follows Agnes von Kurowsky—now in her seventies, living in quiet exile in Key West—as she confronts the legacy of a love affair that was immortalized, transformed, and ultimately taken from her. The world knows her as “Catherine,” the tragic heroine of A Farewell to Arms: beautiful, devoted, tragic. But Catherine never existed. Agnes von Kurowsky did—and this is her story.

IN THE SUMMER of 1918, the final year of World War I, a young Ernest Hemingway falls head over heels in love with a nurse at the hospital in Milan where he is being treated for serious injuries. Eleven years later, now a famous author, he published a novel describing a love affair between a nurse and an American soldier on the Italian front. He named the nurse Catherine Barkley.

THE WOMAN WHO had inspired the author to create the novel’s female protagonist could not recognize herself in the story’s heroine. She felt that something had been taken from her, and the fictional Catherine came to hang over her life like a shadow.