Hemingway shines a light on depression

Voices lecture series hosts actress, author, aims to inspire women

Mariel Hemingway was fortunate. She saw the light, while growing up in a famous family where members often lived in the dark, beset by mental illness, addiction and suicide.

Hemingway, who’ll be the first speaker in the Voices, Inc. series in Portland next week, says it took years to come to grips with her place in life. Depression was the only thing that held her back.

“I was depressed a lot in life, but it was more not understanding history — never clinical depression or suicidal,” said Hemingway, an actress who rose to fame as a star in “Lipstick” at age 14 and then received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for Woody Allen’s “Manhattan” four years later. “What I went through is what many people go through. You lose a parent and a friend and deal with different hormones and imbalances. It was under the umbrella of ‘family with mental illness,’ and afraid of doing things to get better.”

Mind over matter became her ally. She steered herself away from the things that happened with her famous grandfather, Ernest Hemingway, and supermodel sister, Margaux Hemingway. The great writer Ernest was a drinker who shot himself. Her sister was a drug user who overdosed on barbiturates.

Many people in her family dealt with mental illness and addiction, and seven members took their own life.

“We all have choice and free will,” she says. “You have a choice in body, mind, spirit and lifestyle. Those choices form how we’re going to be.

“In wellness, you’re one meal away from eating healthy. You can be an exercise fanatic. You can become whatever you want to be. ... We buy into the story, when you’re in your 50s, that you gotta slow down, be depressed and age, because ‘that’s what you do.’”

You can accept reality, she adds, but “you don’t have to buy into the story of ill health. I’m not making judgments about people who get sick; that’s a whole different ballgame. It’s the attitude that you have.”

It’s the 24th year of Voices lectures in Portland, and they’re meant to inspire, empower and connect women.

Although her entire family has much history to discuss, Hemingway, 54, will share her story in her Voices appearance, 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 28, at the Tiffany Center, 1410 S.W. Morrison St. Tickets are available at www.voicesinc.com.

“I can only give you my story in regard to my own experience,” she says. “I didn’t grow up with my grandfather, but it’s my reaction to being told I lived in a cursed family.”

She has written two books, including her memoir “Out Came the Sun: Overcoming the Legacy of Mental Illness, Addiction, and Suicide in My Family,” and also worked with Oprah Winfrey on the 2013 documentary “Running From Crazy,” about her family and her life.

In her speaking engagement, Hemingway tries to offer some levity among the stories of her place among her famous kin.

“You have to be able to say this is what it is,” she says. “Mental instability and all these different things —whether it’s suicides in the family, at some level you have to accept it, cry and then move on and find the joy within. Because it’s not ‘us,’ it’s what we’re meant to learn from, grow from, but it doesn’t have to become ‘us.’ There’s guilt ... ‘how messed up am I supposed to be?’ But, it’s OK to accept that it’s not ‘us.’”

Hemingway likes to share her story because she knows people can relate to her upbringing.

And, she, in turn, relates to other people.

“I don’t think my story is unique,” she says. “We all share such similarities. We live in a world that we recognize people because we see them on television. It validates our experience; ‘they’re human, just like me.’ It’s important to remember that.”

Visiting Portland is kind of like visiting home. She was raised in Ketchum, Idaho, the youngest daughter of Ernest Hemingway’s son, Jack. It was Ketchum where Ernest Hemingway lived until his death.

Hemingway, named after the Cuban port city where her father and grandfather visited, also spent time in Los Angeles and New York. She has visited Portland many times; her godparents used to live in the city. Told that some Portlanders pride themselves on “Keeping Portland Weird,” she says, “weird is good, I come from weird.”

Hemingway, who lives in Los Angeles, talks about growing up in Idaho, connecting with nature, which was “super important to my well-being, although I didn’t know how important it was at the time of my upbringing.”

She appeared in other movies after “Lipstick” and Manhattan,” but has expanded her career to include speaking, writing and making movies and TV series. She has two grown daugthers from a previous marriage.

She’ll share it all in her Portland speaking engagement.

“The role that I played as a child (family caretaker, actor), and how it grew into my role as a mother and wife, the choices I made good and bad ...,” she says. “Hopefully I’ll make people laugh. That’s the performer in me. I want to tell funny stories about crazy things that I’ve done, connect (with women) so we can come together, and it’s a shared story.”

She’ll turn 55 in November, and she’s happy.

“It took a long time for me to be a mother, be myself and overcome the fear of being crazy,” she says. “I have lots to do now that I don’t have these worries.”