i’ve recently been writing about mary barrelli gallagher’s 1969 memoir, entitled my life with jacqueline kennedy. really, that could be the subtitle of every biographer’s life, non?
my life with X.
Category Archives: jackie
jackie’s pink suit (ie. things are getting weird, ya’ll)
this post may not amount to anything more than a prolonged exclamation of LOOKIT THIS IS BIZARRE!!! accompanied by pretty pictures, most of them in glorious technicolor… but around the 50th anniversary of john kennedy’s assassination last fall, i noticed something that struck me as incredibly odd: a new cultural obsession with jackie’s pink suit.
finding jackie (the initial articulation of my philosophy of ‘life-reading’ [+ angst re: the gossip loop v. silence])
jackie evades me. i’ve been writing about her for ten years and she has never seemed so unclear as now.
this is obvious in my work lately, wherein everyone around her seems vividly alive, jockeying to the forefront as she gets pushed further and further away, into the background, OF HER OWN LIFE. Continue reading
a random appreciation of iris apfel and an accidental continuation of the discourse on fashion exhibits
do you know iris apfel?
you should, because she is amaze. Continue reading
story-telling
i’m slowly coming around to the idea that every problem in academia, writing, biography, life, etc. is, in the end, a problem with story-telling. either we’re telling stories or we’re telling them badly or we don’t know how to tell them or we think we’re not allowed to. Continue reading
musings on stories, sources, stories about sources, sources as story-tellers, and the story of story-telling as relates to the story of jackie kennedy’s alleged love affair with mr. RFK (ie. the sex lives of dead people, reprise)
Lest you think biographers do nothing but lazing about eating bonbons and sipping champagne, it actually boils down to, for me anyway, rather a whole lot of intellectual/psychological heavy lifting about motivations and character and societal demands. Fun times!
the sex lives of dead people (ie. the ‘jackie slept with nureyev! bobby slept with nureyev! everybody slept with nureyev!’ brouhaha caused by a book not yet published which i’ve not yet read)
so there was a little article in the daily mail last week about how everyone who was anyone in the 1960s slept with the danzatore rudolph nureyev. as we all know, pretty much everyone who was anyone in the ’60s was a kennedy. and so: nureyev made it with the whole clan!!! Continue reading
some thoughts on jackie upon the occasion of the 50th anniversary of her 1st husband’s death
she hated the 22nd, jackie did. hated that people chose to remember the day JFK died rather than the day of his birth or the inauguration or anything else. hated that they chose to remember the killing and not the life. she’d cancel the papers, but it didn’t matter because there’d be displays in store windows, people on the street, etc. one particularly bad year, on the anniversary, children from her son’s school followed the pair of them home shouting at the little boy ‘your father’s dead! your father’s dead!’ as he held his mother’s hand.
so i’ve mixed feelings re: writing now. re: posting tomorrow, which is why i’m posting today. because my loyalty is, as always, with her. Continue reading
entirely too few words in praise of the long-suffering debo, who has been hearing about this project since the beginning of time
so i’ve been a little silent here because i’ve slaving away elsewhere, readying the sex toboggans- which are (is?), in fact, now titled “DESPERATE WOMEN GAMBLE ALL!” (catchy, non?)- for a future thing.
QUESTION.
i’m working on a theoretical something and i don’t know if i even buy it, so i’ma throw it out to the internets.
here’s my deal:
is “narrative interdependence” a thing?
say you always see two stories presented together. to pick at random… hey, howsabout jackie and liz?
so jackie (and we’re talking 1962- so onassis has not yet happened) is quite obviously the positive example, the woman all women are supposed to want to be like. and liz is the baddie. and they’re presented together in magazines like A LOT. Continue reading
an alarming life 
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