(27 april 2011)

i’m sitting in riverside center room 12 listening to this guy wax on about how the male youths of the 60s were pivotally influenced by the depictions of manhood in john wayne’s the sands of iwo jima when i realize that i am maybe writing two books. three if you count that other book that i’ve not really written but about the writing of which i’m writing in that additional book.

so, four.

four books.

i am writing four books.

but what i’m really doing is not writing any of them.

one of the four is done. except that it isn’t because i’m pretty sure now that it may need to become two. if not, it sure as hell needs to become a better one because it’s maybe a half at present. and a crap half at that.

so what we have is this:

jackie: the definitive biography
jackie: the tabloid years
jackie in paris: the biography
jackie in paris: the novel of the failed attempt to write the biography

none of them written. none of them being written.

there’s this phase of writing we don’t talk about much. the phase where you’re writing nothing.

this tends to look like laziness. i would argue it isn’t. but then, maybe i’d think that precisely because it’s the stage i’m in. it’s easier to justify the notion that i’m mentally arranging pieces and plotting course than to admit i’m stewing in a pit of ideas from which i cannot crawl out.

in high school, due to my great fear of tardiness and inability to master a combination lock, i never used my locker but, instead, lugged 30 pounds of textbooks around every day.

that is how writing sometimes feels. all those books and projects and pieces crammed into your skull. you carry them around with you, because it’s a frightening process to get them out and because you do not yet have the key.

(24 march 2011)

i wrote the sister again.

yes, the sister has already informed me she does not give interviews about jackie, but considering i have very little to lose beyond pride and dignity and all that shit that i’m pretty sure i shouldn’t value quite so much as i do, i wrote her again.

this brings me the closest to groveling that i have thus far come. and i can proudly say with some dignity, i don’t feel the least bit bad about it.

(17 january 2011)

i wonder sometimes if i’ve got it all wrong. made up a series of elaborate meanings where there are, in fact, none.

these are the scary days.

on the good days, it makes perfect sense and most days are good days.

gossip is a socially useful device. other people have proven that.

human beings are naturally self-centered. people have proven that as well.

and so, on the good days, it doesn’t seem such a leap to say that human beings take in gossip and apply it to their own lives. it’s only on the bad days that i realize this leap is enormous.

i am standing on a mountain of proven facts shouting something no one else has said. at least not in writing.

i would argue jackie’s was the most significant female life of the 20th century. i would argue the 1970s were the most important years of that life. i would argue that for reasons no one would ever guess and most everything ever published would argue that my argument is wrong.

i don’t really know what to do with that. except maybe shout a bit louder.

(12 january 2011)

i am alarmingly resistant to different ways of thinking. not necessarily in life in general, but when it comes to jackie, i take an extraordinarily limited view and subscribe to the age-old paradigm that one must write a book, find an agent, find a publisher, get published.

this has not worked for me in the past so Lord only knows why i cling to it still.

the problem with this, with the narrowness of my expectations, is that it makes it that much harder to ever get off the ground. there are too many impossibles, too many ifs. and if you never begin, you go nowhere.

for six years, i have been sitting on a book. a book that is written and which contends that jackie is an empty vessel. that she is an icon that encompasses every aspect of the mid-century female experience. a symbol that can take on any set of meanings we want her to have.

i have been sitting on this completed work since june 23, 2005, and i have only just now realized that, with this research, i can write papers on nearly every topic known to man.

jackie and motherhood. jackie and marriage. jackie and religion. jackie and wealth. jackie and racial relations. jackie as advertisement. jackie as self-help. jackie and sex. jackie and see-through tops.

i am only just now seeing i can take this show on the road.

it seems so stupidly obvious now. to be putting into practice the point i have been making all along. and yet, because the word “academic” most often translates as a pejorative, i have held back. i have been ridiculous.

because i have complained time and again that biographers hand down faulty information from one book to the next as though jackie’s story were a handmade quilt with which we must never mess. i have said this is wrong and yet i have done the same thing.

i have the missing piece of a puzzle no one has begun to put together. and i have kept that puzzle unused, unopened and in its original box.

lara said it was going to be the year we get published.

i didn’t believe her.

i was wrong.

(16 december 2010)

i am still writing letters. and, blessedly, getting letters in return. it is a struggle to comprehend that these letters are, in fact, progress. i put that down to the fact that they inevitably arrive in my life at points of extreme banality.

it is 6 p.m. on a tuesday. i am wearing a nightgown and kneesocks waiting on pasta to boil when i notice the sister has written me back.

oddly, it is news that i keep to myself for several days.

it’s a measure of how spoiled i have become that, upon receiving this letter, i assume it is from the daughter. that it is from the sister is somewhat of a surprise.

thanks to the myriad scope of things one reads when searching for the addresses of famous people on the internet, i know that the sister routinely takes upwards of six months to return autographed photos to her fans. since my letter went out into the world sans a zip code and to an unverified location that was an odd conglomerate of an address the step-brother had given me and one mistyped on fundrace.org, i expected that it was being sent forth into an abyss, never to be heard from again. but just twelve days later, here is a response.

a response that says very little, mind you, but a response nonetheless. the only thing of particular note being that the sister says i am right.

i have explained my project to the sister and she has said, “i think you are certainly right.”

while i kind of already knew that- it being generally accepted historical fact and all- it’s a tremendous relief to have it acknowledged. it feels terribly good to be right, for certain.

i immediately imagine how this can be best incoroporated into my letter of introduction.

voilà!

i gently set this letter from the sister atop the pile of important papers on the floor, approximately six inches from the liter box. satisfied, i hike up my kneesocks and take the pasta off the stove.

(17 november 2010)

writing biography is like being blanche dubois. you’ve nothing except the kindness of strangers upon which to rely.

you hope they will remember. that they will talk. to you. that they will not die and take their secrets with them.

i’m writing a letter to the sister. the brother and the sister did not get along and the brother does not have the sister’s address and so i am sending this letter to the sister to an address the brother gave me at which the sister’s daughter may or may not still live in the hopes that it will reach the sister’s daughter who will then pass my letter along to the sister and the sister will then write me back.

that’s a whole heap of contingencies. particularly for a letter on which i forgot to include a return address.

i’ve written the sister before. seven years ago, i wrote her about this very thing. with my letter i included a list of 27 questions, most of them featuring separate bullet points. i pray she does not remember that. at this point, 10 seems a brazen liberty to take with someone’s time.

the sister is endlessly fascinating. she inspires an admixture of slight pity and extreme awe.

i do not expect she will write back. but i’ve gotten rather accustomed to the receipt of famous mail and there’s a part of me that’s getting cocky, spoiled by the people who have written back, even if only to say they don’t remember.

i want her to write back because she’s The Sister and she may have biographically important things to say and blah blah blah.

but mostly, i want her to write back so i can have a piece of paper with that handwriting. the handwriting that is just a few genetic degrees removed from jackie’s, which i know better than my own.