The Importance of Not Being Ernest Mariel Hemingway gets up early, perhaps as an unconscious homage to her famous grandfather, to watch the sun rise. Each morning, while still in bed, she and her live-in boyfriend, an erstwhile stuntman and actor named Bobby Williams, begin a series of predawn exercises that consist of breathing, stretching, contemplating the things they're grateful for and visualizing the day ahead. Hemingway then makes the bed and a pot of jasmine green tea. She fills the hummingbird feeders with organic sugar water, feeds organic soy-free meal to the brood of egg-laying hens that live in her backyard and heads back to the kitchen to prepare a smoothie. Holly Andres for The New York Times Hemingway and Bobby Williams at home in Malibu, Calif. At this point in their elaborate morning ritual, on an overcast day in early May, I joined Hemingway and Williams. They live in a modest three-bedroom ranch house hidden behind a giant oak tree, at the end of a sinuous maze of gravelly roads, deep in a canyon on the edge of Malibu. At quarter to 6, Hemingway was in the kitchen steeping her second pot of green tea while talking about a recent dinner with Woody Allen, who directed her Oscar-nominated performance in "Manhattan" - their first meeting in 15 years. At 51, Hemingway still bears an uncanny resemblance to the 17-year-old girl she portrayed in that film: she has the same long, athletic limbs; the cliff-jump cheekbones; the high, distinctive, Muppet voice. But whereas her character in "Manhattan" was unnaturally poised and still, Hemingway is loose, unguarded and disarmingly funny. Williams padded into the room, still blurry with sleep. Shirtless and in yoga pants, he displayed the chiseled muscles of someone for whom working out is a primary occupation. In the 1990s, he was the guy exercising in the Soloflex commercial. Although he is 50, there is much about him, from the diminutive "Bobby" to his mop of brown hair, that seems boyish. His manner, however, can be tightly coiled. "O.K., first of all, let's tell the truth," he said. You wouldn't even hear me breathing in the morning. You're here, so Mariel's giving you stories, but she doesn't talk at all. "You don't say a word," Hemingway said. Don't throw me under the bus! She laughed. In silence, Williams, whom Hemingway calls her "life partner" - they have been together for four and a half years - began loading ingredients into a blender: avocados, coconut water, dates, superfood powder and various herbal tinctures. Hemingway narrated over the grinding. We put in turmeric for inflammation . . . cinnamon for metabolism and blood . . . the dates are for the thyroid, plus the sweetness is nice. . . . We don't put fruit in it because it changes it from being an alkaline thing to being more acidic. Hemingway, who has written a yoga memoir, an organic-foods cookbook and two self-help books (one written with Williams), believes that the quotidian decisions we make, from the foods we consume to the amount of time we spend lollygagging on the Internet - what she calls our "lifestyle choices" - have a profound impact on mood and well-being. She has maintained this for years, long before the idea became mainstream. "I definitely grew up the healthiest person on the planet," her daughter, Langley Fox, told me. "My first "cookie" was a nonflavored rice cracker. How a healthy lifestyle will help your whole well-being - I got the whole spiel. It's a topic Hemingway has thought a lot about, because her family not only has a celebrated artistic legacy but also a darker psychological one. Her grandfather, the writer Ernest Hemingway, was a notorious heavy drinker who suffered frequent bouts of depression and committed suicide by shooting himself in the head with a 12-gauge double-barreled shotgun at age 61, four months before Mariel was born. Her older sister Margaux, one of the highest-paid models of the 1970s, struggled with drug addiction, bulimia and alcohol-induced epilepsy; at 41, on the day before the 35th anniversary of her grandfather's death, she intentionally overdosed on phenobarbital. Her oldest sister, Muffet, is bipolar and schizophrenic and has been in and out of institutions much of her life.