it is so very different. and yet also eerily similar.
especially the way the story presses against your brain.
all of the voices within it, like a choir with an orchestra, but you don’t quite have the music.
so it’s just voices and that weirdly lovely chaos of noise when the orchestra is warming up.
this’ll be about jackie having died on this day twenty-eight years ago today.
wait for it.
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what i remember is all of the adults in my life going into the den and shutting the door.
that’s not actually an accurate memory, as it was my mother and ann, our cleaner, and then, later, my dad. but that’s the memory. the adults in a room with the door shut and me, age 4 1/2, on the other side of it.
this was the year after The Year Everyone Died– my friend from next door, my mother’s grandfather, my father’s boss– so we were already, then, somewhat a house in mourning. or, at the very least, a house that had spent a lot of the previous year avoiding discussion of grief and death whilst living submerged within it.
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this is a thing we historically have done so i’mma just dive right on in.
if you’re like DOCTOR ONLINE WUT EVEN IS THIS, i refer you to my rich seam of informal, doctoral-level scholarship on emotions and dolls: HERE.
ya’ll.
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it is like a nesting doll, all of it. my life with jackie, my writing about jackie. so that when i read the pages i have written about jackie, the whole book i have written on her life, it unpacks a whole series of memories of my own.
where i was when i wrote that sentence.
who i was sitting next to at the british library when i found that quote. (invariably, always, obviously, nanette.)
what i didn’t know was about to happen when i was in that archive.
the feeling of the wind in my hair and the blue blue sky above as i walked home after wandering round the yacht.
it is her life and it is mine.
they are, by this point, so braided up. Continue reading
it is like a nesting doll, my life with jackie. a series of anniversaries, each now saturated in its own memories.
because when you write about someone else, you are ultimately writing about yourself.
when you write about someone for twenty-five years, writing about that person is actually you living your life. Continue reading
today, class, a close reading of the DM’s article of 16 february 2018, entitled: “Sisters who competed to snare the world’s richest men: Schooled by their mother to seek out power, a new book reveals the jealousy between Jackie O and sister Lee and how they both bedded JFK.”
i mean, just right there, yeah?
if we’re having a reckoning, hey, let’s look at biography.
this is edward klein:
(via twitter)
we need to talk about him. Continue reading
an alarming life 
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