Outside three girls are leaning up against the building in wool sweaters, faces to the weak November sun. A copy of A Farewell to Arms is facedown on the flagstones beside one of them. Imagine forcing girls to read about the fake and obsequious and self-immolating Catherine Barkley. ‘There isn’t any me. I’m you. Don’t make up a separate me.’ The only Hemingway I’d ever assign is The Sun Also Rises and only really for that passage when he goes into the church and prays for everybody and himself twice and wishes he felt religious and comes out into the hot sun on the steps of the cathedral with
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