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.
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
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.
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