“Jackie is a novel, a work of fiction inspired by the life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. It is the story of a woman who projected a myriad of selves and who was, at her core, a deeply private person, with a nuanced and formidable intellect. It is also the story of a love affair, a complicated marriage, and the fracturing of identity that comes in the wake of unthinkable violence.”
That’s the opening to the Author’s Note of Dawn Tripp’s Jackie: A Novel. After doing extensive research, Tripp ultimately wanted, as she says, “to explore the space between what took place and what Jackie might have felt.”
The novel opens with that fateful day, November 22, 1963, when her husband was shot, but then quickly reverts to the Spring of 1951 when she first met John Kennedy and continues chronologically through the end of her life. I didn’t realize how smart and well-read she was and that she would often suggest books for President Kennedy to read or quotes to use in speeches. I didn’t know how much Bobby Kennedy helped her after President Kennedy’s assassination, and, therefore, how devastated she was when Bobby was also killed. I also didn’t know she was good friends with Carly Simon and that when she worked in the publishing world, she preferred not to have her name included in the credits.
Tripp includes an extensive nonfiction bibliography at the end of her book, in case you read this book and wonder how much of it is true. However, as Tripp says at the end of her introduction, if you believe that “Fiction can be a means of cutting past the surface of what we think we know, to reshape our collective understanding of a person, an era, a life” then you must read Jackie: A Novel by Dawn Tripp.
