Elena Bowes spoke to best-selling American author Dawn Tripp about her latest novel, Jackie. Grounded in historical research, Dawn captures the essence of Jackie Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, the woman behind the myth, the enigma that was Jackie O.
The Washington Post said, “To write a book on someone who has already been relentlessly scrutinized is a daring enterprise.” Thank you, Dawn, for daring.
The following Q&A has been edited for clarity and brevity. You can listen to the entire Q&A on Elena’s podcast, Elena Meets the Author.
Dawn, in your excellent novel that portrays the intimate life of Jackie, not the public person we all know, the private one we don’t know, you write: “No one wants to know the real story, the private story, the evolution of a woman’s interior life… They tell us the story of what happened to her. And in the world’s eyes, usually what happened to a woman is men.” I’d love to hear how you first realized there was so much more to Jackie than meets the eye.
It was actually five years before I started working on this book. My son had brought home The Best Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis for me to read aloud to my sons at bedtime. I read from the introduction which had been written by her daughter Caroline. And while I’d known that Jackie had a passion for books, I’d never considered her mind, her psyche, her emotional life as a reader.
In Caroline’s introduction she talked about how books had been central to her mother’s childhood, and how she ensured that books were central to Caroline’s childhood. At the end of the introduction Caroline reflected on how her parents, her brother and she had faith in the power of ideas and how the words we use to describe our ideas is the greatest power we have.
I remember reading that sentence and it was like a bolt of lightning. I thought, who was she? I thought there never has been a narrative built around this extraordinary woman’s intellect. She was so smart. She had a passion for literature, art, history, travel and not travel for luxury, but travel to learn about other cultures’ traditions and histories.
One of the things I loved about your book was not just getting to know and admire Jackie, but the love story between her and Jack.
That was a dimension of their story that I wasn’t expecting to find. In the ten years that it took to research and write this book, that was the thing that surprised me the most. They were in love. I think we sometimes forget just how young they were. It was a young, complicated marriage.
I was curious about why she was drawn to him. She knew about his reputation as a womanizer. She was drawn to his mind, how smart he was, how he was constantly asking questions. She was drawn to his vulnerability, the fact that he loved to read.
Can you tell us about the research you did?
I read about a hundred books, countless articles. I spent a great deal of time in the archives of the JFK Library, including the online archives which are an incredible resource. I was looking for details that were in the historical record but weren’t necessarily the details that other narratives had engaged. And anything that was controversial, I looked to verify in several biographies. I didn’t want to take liberties with her story. I loved reading transcribed interviews.
Can you tell us how the cover of the book helped you find the voice for the book?
I was six or seven years into writing the book, and it wasn’t quite working. I knew it wasn’t quite working. My longtime editor said, “I think what you’re doing here is good, but you’re not going deep enough. I feel like this book wants to be written in the first person.”
The book was originally written in the third person. I felt like I couldn’t do it in first person, so I put the book aside for a bit. Then I had a conversation with my dad who encouraged me to go back and find the things that were interesting to me, that moved me.
So, I started going through photographs, not the photographs we see, that are all over the place. I started digging for photographs the way I dig for facts. I wanted to find images that surprised me, that caught me off guard, that were showing different sides to who she was and who she and Jack were together. And then I saw this photograph, and I remember I just stopped. It’s such a beautiful image of Jackie and Jack. They’re standing in the doorway of an airport. It’s June 1957. I knew what was going on in their life then was complicated. They were four years into their marriage, a young marriage. She was pregnant with Caroline. She’d already lost a baby. And because I knew the material so well, I knew it was a very difficult time in their life.
In the photograph, he’s leaning towards her, perhaps to say something, perhaps to kiss her goodbye. And she’s standing with her back to the camera. There’s a stiffness, she’s keeping herself a little removed. I was so curious about that tense and complicated intimacy between them. I printed out that image and kept it with me. And in the novel that photograph reappears. They each remember that moment for different reasons and in different ways. As a writer, I knew I had the voice for the book. I rewrote the whole book in first person. Rewriting was exhilarating.
How was writing this book different for you than your previous novel, Georgia about American artist Georgia O’Keefe?
Well, for me Georgia’s an artist, and I feel like I am an artist. So, there was a point of connection that really resonated with me. For Jackie, I was drawn to her life as a mother, her children were central to her life and decision making. I was drawn to what a voracious reader she was. And I was drawn to her relationship with the sea. I also have a profound relationship to the sea.
Georgia was more an excavation of a story that wasn’t well know. Jackie felt much more daunting. She’s so well-known and has been written about endlessly. I had to pare back the layers of myth and media, what she called ‘the river of sludge’ to try and get at the grain of who she really was, what gave her life integrity, what mattered to her.
I didn’t realize she was fluent in so many languages, French, Spanish and Italian. She helped Jack a lot in his career.
One of the things I admire about Jack is at a time when women weren’t always respected, he really respected her mind, her voice, her opinion. He respected what she brought. He may not have started out doing that, but he came to that. He evolved and changed. In the last year of his life, he turned to his friend and said, “There’s only one woman in this world I could have married, and I married her.”
Can you tell us about Jackie’s role in preserving Jack’s legacy?
I have such admiration for her. She had just been through this unthinkable violence, this unthinkable trauma, many people wouldn’t be able to function after that (JFK’s assassination in the car with Jackie seated next to him), and yet despite that, she stewarded the country forward, and her children… She also stewarded JFK’s initiatives. She helped to ensure his legacy was sustained.
She began to plan his funeral the day he died. It’s important to remember that the day that she buried her husband, she’s talking to De Galle and other world leader’s downstairs at the White House and then she excuses herself. “Excuse me, it’s my son’s birthday today and I need to go upstairs because we’re having a party.’ That’s the mark of a truly extraordinary human being.
I also found it interesting that she was so stylish, yet it was far from the only thing she put time into.
It was a dimension. She was always very intentional about her clothes. She was very creative and artistic and cared about the creative side of fashion. There’s a quote where she says she eschews clothes that made her look like a lampshade. She wanted dresses that made her look like an Ionic column.
Reading your book, I thought of how hard her subsequent marriage to Aristotle Onassis must have been. She had just lost the love of her life and then she was with a man who didn’t seem to appreciate her.
Ari wanted to win her, and he did a lot of work to do that. And he offered her protection and space away at a time when she was worried about the safety and wellbeing of her children. But he found he couldn’t tame Jackie. He couldn’t control her.
Whereas Jack admired that dimension of Jackie, that wasn’t something Ari embraced. There’s a quote from Jack where he says, “You know Jackie, she’ll say, ‘oh yes Jack, and then she’s going to do exactly what she wants.”
Your book is divided into three parts: Her marriage to Jack, then Ari and then her life as a woman who works because she wants to. Do you think she was happy in that third part of her life?
I do. She had had a lot of loss, but I think in the last two decades of her life she was finally creating a life that was on her own terms. She really loved work. She loved routine. She was also very grounded in nature. She bought a piece of land on Martha’s Vineyard and laid out the house with a piece of string. She wanted it to be a house the children would want to come home to. She was always close to her children. In one interview she said she often thought it was the best thing she ever did. Her children were at the forefront of her mind and her life and her choices.
Thank you so much.
Listen to the full interview here.