i’m over at contrary magazine’s blog today waxing on about re-reading beloved books. please do read, re-post, like, love, tweet, tell your friends. xox, o.
Author Archives: oline
a gentle reminder re: Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversation on Life with John F. Kennedy (the book i’ve not yet read/the tapes i’ve not yet heard)
there’s an account of jackie that stands out to me among all the others, if only because it’s irreconcilable with the woman the media portrays.
it comes from an old female acquaintance, who complained of jacqueline during the 1940s: “she had so many sides. she behaved very capriciously. she’d be very seductive to a man at a party, sitting next to him, and then stub her cigarette on his hand.”
this is the jackie i love. the ballsy bitch beneath the breathy voice. this is also, from the sound of it, the jackie that the world will be meeting through the jackie tapes. a woman both cuttingly perceptive and astonishingly catty.
the jackie tapes are fascinating, yes (i assume). they teach us many things we did not know (jackie disliked mlk! and degaulle! and lbj! and ted sorenson!) and remind us of others (she love loved andré malraux).
my one concern about these tapes is this: they represent jackie at one point in time. and, if jackie teaches us anything, it is that it’s dangerous to reduce anyone to a single story. we are all more complex, more nuanced than any interview or anecdote could ever convey.
balls up
i am a biographer.
i’d been working up the nerve to say that for months. before, “becoming” always crept into that statement. because it seemed too ballsy to state that i was, in fact, what i already am.
but a biographer is not a butterfly. it is something you are, not something you become.
every biographer i’ve met takes a different view of what it means to be a biographer and of how to best go about that. but, as is the case with most things in life, there are a million and one ways and you can have your pick.
i have chosen, obviously, a way that looks like utter insanity and seems to make very little sense.
in that, i keep coming back to these two things:
the sacrifice of expectations and the suspension of disbelief.
not to go all oprah here, but i think these are key if you’re going to actually be what, deep down, you already are. because you can’t create something new unless you give up your plans for how it’s going to look and you can’t dream big unless you accept that anything can be.
that’s the extent of my wisdom. that and buy the most beautiful business cards in all the world. because even if they’re an outrageous extravagance and you have to eat leaves and grass for the whole week after to pay them off, the look of amazement and the exclamation of THAT is a NICE card that comes out of the mouth of each person to whom you give one will make it well worth the expense.
p.s.
i’m being cheeky and writing about banned books over HERE.
“Kathleen Winsor’s Forever Amber contains 70 references to sexual intercourse, 39 illegitimate pregnancies, seven abortions and ten descriptions of women undressing in front of men. Upon its publication in 1944, the novel was banned in 14 states, and denounced as immoral. It is… which is why you should read it.”
pinned
i’m in newport again. the stepbrother isn’t feeling well.
he’s been working on his tan, sunning at the beach every afternoon. he tells me this when i walk in the door. his blue eyes shine bright in the golden brown of his face.
the pauses are long but i’m getting better at this. i’ve learned to wait, to be patient. so we sit in the thick silence as he searches for the words.
i find myself watching him- jackie’s 84-year-old stepbrother on whom i have a teeny crush. observing his facial features as they arrange themselves in preparation for the communication of a thought.
but sometimes my mind wanders and, during one of these pauses, it darts back to something someone said. that i am confusing, contradictory. that my projects are incoherent.
i sit there, on that low-to-the-ground couch in the stepbrother’s sunroom wondering if i am doomed by my own whimsicality. if i will fail because my personality, my interests, my self are inconsistent.
we’ve been deep into an analysis of jfk’s foreign policy in the middle east when the stepbrother coughs and, apropos of nothing, he says: you know, oline, i’m presbyterian but i go to the episcopal church… i teach islam at the school and i’m a christian but most days i think the muslims have got it all right… i’m a conservative and i love obama… my friends tell me i make no sense… but i make sense enough for me so i don’t listen to them.
having said this, he levels a steady gaze in my direction. it’s as though he has read my mind.
he holds the gaze a few seconds and then shoots me a flirtatious wink.
i’m struck upon leaving that i may never see him again. this hits me as absolutely the saddest thing.
ps.
i’ve a little post on cleopatra over HERE.
“Our view of Cleopatra is often sadly limited – we applaud the sex life of the Egyptian queen (who was actually Greek) but ignore her tenacity and political skill…”
people you may know
a funny thing has happened to my facebook “people you may know.”
it began with jennifer egan.
because i know two people who apparently know jennifer egan, facebook thought i might know her too. i do not know her, outside of the fact that she won the pulitzer three days before facebook thought we might be friends.
next there was erica jong.
i do not know erica jong. facebook thinks i maybe do. so i laughed and found this both flattering and an unwelcome reminder of how under-read i am in the area of feminist thought.
but then there was nick hornby.
NICK HORNBY.
NICK freaking HORNBY.
whom i have read. who facebook thinks i may know. who i would like to know and to whom, if i had any less dignity, i would write a gushing fan letter on how about a boy totally changed my eighteen-year-old life.
yes. it’s true. i am facebook friends with people who are facebook friends with NICK freaking HORNBY.
i’m well aware this should mean absolutely nothing. that, in reality, it does mean nothing. and yet it feels momentous.
and while i’m horrified to think what it says about my biographical career that i am, at present, charting its development through the increasing famousness of the people facebook thinks i may know, this does represent tangible progress.
because, when i look at them over there in the right margin and read that statement with a slightly different inflection, it rings entirely true. these are people i may know. someday.
and then there was paris
there are things you know you need to do.
by which i don’t mean the honorable, upstanding things, but the thoroughly stupid, senseless, impractical ones. the things people will warn you away from doing precisely because they seem to make no sense.
but these people, they do not see the story of which these stupid, senseless, impractical things may later one day be a part. i am blessed/cursed. i see the story.
it hadn’t occurred to me that i needed to go paris until i was alone in new york.
this was in march, early in my first doomed attempt to locate the top shop at the corner of broome and broadway that, despite two subsequent trips and copious billboards attesting to its existence, i have still never found. when i walked out of washington square park at the intersection of 4th and mcdougal, the light hit the pavement in such a way that can only be described as a very poor imitation of cimetière du montparnasse on 27 september 2009.
seeing that, there was no way i could not go to paris.
that sounds beyond ridiculous when you try to explain it: i’m a biographer writing this book about jackie in paris that i’m really not writing because there’s no there there, but i know in my soul that i’m meant to go to paris because the light in new york just wasn’t pretty enough.
dude! crazypants! and yet…
going to paris is part of the story. if not jackie’s then mine. i clung to that belief for months. practicality be damned, i was going to paris! and i did.
while in london last month, i hopped over to paris for thirteen hours. systematically, i hit the high points of that city i love, all the while eyes peeled for whatever it was that was going to make sense of the fact that i was there.
and i got nothing.
jackie’s houses were uninspiring and my travels uneventful. the little cafe outside notre dame where, two years before i’d had The French Fries of My Life, had since removed them from the menu.
at one point, desperate, i picked up a rock from a walkway by the eiffel tower because then, if i returned without a tale, without words, i’d at least have something tangible from this trip to hold in my hand.
with two hours left- annoyed, tired and with terribly sore feet- i collapsed on a bench in the back garden of notre dame. half an hour later, my story sat down on the opposite bench.
this is a useful metaphor. or at least i choose to see it as such because it is evidence that i am not crazy. paris was part of the story. and the story is always there, whether it looks as we imagine it will or not.
[need more paris? go HERE.]
elsewhere on the internets
i’m over on CheekyChicago today writing about a deliciously naughty book…
explosions!
read THIS and then let’s talk.
i will now answer a series of questions you have not asked:
(1) did lyndon johnson kill JFK and have a love affair with a movie star as the sentence structure of this headline would lead us to believe? no.
(2) was lyndon johnson ever governor of the state of texas? no.
(3) did jackie gave arthur schlessinger a deeply revealing interview that was not to be released until 50 years after her death? yes.
(4) was this interview in any way ever “secret”? no.
(5) are the tapes “explosive”? YES!!!! or no.
(6) did jackie have a love affair with william holden? she cut her hair like audrey hepburn’s in sabrina, so the answer is obviously yes.
(7) did jackie find the panties of jfk’s teenaged lover in her white house bedroom? this has been a set-piece scene in every single kennedy made-for-tv movie of all time, so it’s clearly totally true.
the theory on which i’ve based nearly everything i’ve ever written about jackie is that we are all of us reading tabloids all the time. yes, you may not subscribe to u.s. weekly and you may not know jessica simpson’s age and the name of her hairdresser, and you can pretend you’re above this, but if you do, you’re sorely underestimating the american celebrity-industrial complex.
we’re all in this together. if you read a snippet of gossip anywhere online this morning, you are reading u.s. weekly just as good as if you subscribed.
the tabloids are everywhere. they are on fox news and cnn. they are usually cited, but their information is presented within a news report so it’s hard not to take it as truth.
case in point- on sunday, a british tabloid recycled a story that, in america, has fronted the national enquirer time and again. by monday, it had traveled across the pond into the american mainstream press and we were all wondering if jackie was sleeping around and promoting conspiracy theories better peddled by oliver stone. never mind that every article sourced the daily mail and abc promptly denied the reports- the story had wings and it took off.
and, as much as i love tabloids, this is what i hate about them: i hate that this is the narrative people will remember. people who have never read a book about jackie and will not listen to the “secret” “explosive” jackie tapes in the fall, people who won’t listen then and hear her say whatever it is she’s going to say in that crazy strange voice of hers, they will remember this.
they’ll remember her as that woman who slept around to get even, who thought a man that was never governor of texas did her husband in.
that’s what they’ll remember though it’s not who she was.
an alarming life 
You must be logged in to post a comment.