The Secret Memoirs of
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
by
Ruth Francisco
Who was Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis? She
was a wife, mother, artist, editor, and world traveler. A bright young woman who
rose to unparalleled celebrity. One of the world's most inspiring and
influential women of her day, she has become arguably the most important female
icon of all time. Yet she also was a woman of passion and deep emotions, who
wanted to experience all that life had to give. How did she feel about it all?
She never told.
Jackie said quite famously, "I want to live my life, not record it." Jackie
remains elusive, her interior life hidden, her soul masked behind sunglasses and
an enigmatic smile. For the first time, these fictional memoirs tell Jackie's
story in Jackie's voice—with all her joy and wit, grief and bitterness,
gentleness and fortitude.
Ruth Francisco boldly plunges into the subtext of Jackie's public life,
psychology, and sexuality, beyond her dazzling mythic exterior, reimagining
Jackie's feelings and thoughts between the lines of recorded history. In this
riveting epic tale, we follow Jackie's journey from her privileged yet wrenching
youth, through the exaltation and suffering of her marriage to John F. Kennedy,
to the shattering despair of her losses, exile, and loneliness. As she learns to
forgive her jealous rival, Maria Callas, and her abusive second husband,
Aristotle Onassis, Jackie begins to find redemption, ultimately discovering
peace through her children and her work.
Powerful, poignant, and inspiring, The Secret Memoirs of Jacqueline Kennedy
Onassis is a sweeping novel, a mythic fable of the trials and tribulations
of the female soul.
An intimate portrait? Or
salacious exploitation?
Released amid the furor over James Frey's
A Million Little Pieces, Ruth Francisco’s fictional memoir, The Secret Memoirs
of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, has turned into a brain tease for fiction and
nonfiction readers alike.
Francisco never expected to write a controversial book. “I wanted to write a
thoughtful, sensitive portrait of Jackie Kennedy in her voice, to attempt to get
inside the mind one of the most admired women of the twentieth century.”
But controversy is what she got.
The New York Post, in a full-page story, called it a “Salacious 'memoir', a big
trick”, “steamy”, with “explicit scenes of slam-bam sex”, The New York Times
called it a “lurid and ostensibly candid globe-trotting memoir, complete with
presidential pillow talk”, “stranger than fiction”, and the reviewer for the New
York Daily News was so shocked that she dismissed it entirely, “just too nasty”,
preferring to “fall back on memories of a woman who compelled us from a
distance.” Francisco appeared on Entertainment Tonight, defending the thoroughly
researched foundation for her writing. And then, the only fiction buyer for
Barnes & Noble (apparently without reading the book) refused initially to buy it
for any Barnes & Noble stores because she thought it “disrespectful”.
The irony is that whereas James Frey was lambasted for leaning toward emotional
truth rather than fact, Francisco’s book, which is fiction, is criticized not
for what she made up, but for what she reports from nonfiction biographical
sources, i.e. the less than savory aspects of Camelot. In other words, it has
been criticized as if it were nonfiction.
The release of The Secret Memoirs of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis comes just as a
crisis is rising in our written letters. What is fiction? What is creative
nonfiction? What is memoir? What are the boundaries? Is any invention or
reimagining of dialog and action allowable in nonfiction? Are either a
nonfiction or fiction author’s search for emotional truth and desire to reveal
motivation license to invent history as it might have been? Most biographies do
include such scenes and dialog.
Yet The Secret Memoirs of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis is clearly fiction.
None of the critics have noted how beautifully written the book is, how moving
it is, how poignantly it portrays the difficult life of a vibrant woman.
Bestselling author's James Lee Burke said of the book, "Francisco has both the
eye and heart of a poet and each of her scenes is like a perfect painting", and
bestselling author Michael Connelly wrote, "With this book Ruth Francisco
underlines the power of fiction when it comes to telling the truth about who we
are."
Clearly there is a divide here in sensibility. Also, interestingly, reviewers
are having a bi-coastal feud over the book. New Yorkers, who appear to have
forgotten that they vilified Jackie for a decade after her marriage to Aristotle
Onassis, seem to have claimed her as their patron saint. Hands off! On the West
Coast the reaction is different, where the book is seen as “intriguing and
imaginative” (Orange Coast Magazine).
Surely it makes Jackie a stronger and more admirable character to see her
survive grief and suffering. Would it do her justice to shy away from her dark
side, to disallow her sensuality? Is not redemption more interesting, more
poignant, than idolatry?
People love it or hate it. Are offended or inspired. Is it scandalous and
exploitative? Or is it valid fiction, humanizing an American icon? The
controversy continues.
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