Immersion

I love simultaneously reading several books on the same subject. This summer I read Jack's Widow by Eve Pollard immediately after reading November 22, 1963 by Adam Braver. As you might guess, both are about the Kennedys. Both are a mix of fact and fiction, like most books about celebrities, whether the authors are honest about it or not.
By reading these books so close together I got a continuous flow of the story of Jackie O's life: glimpses of her girlhood; meeting, marrying and burying John F. Kennedy; meeting and marrying Aristotle Onassis. The basic facts in each work were real--the structure of the story was historically sound, but the authors provided fictional tidbits about microphones hidden in pillbox hats and fingerprints smudging a metal casket.
It's always interesting to get different people's perspectives on the same thing. Braver's Jackie is the fresh widow; the beautiful woman in the blood-spattered pink suit and then numb behind her black veil. Pollard's Jackie is daring and cunning, ready to spy for her country and marry strategically.
I had never been very interested in Jacqueline Kennedy/Onassis before, but I found myself liking the woman behind the fiction. I had the same experience when I researched Marilyn Monroe, Jackie's bête noire, for a role I was playing my senior year of college. These women are cultural icons, but all I'd ever gotten was the legend until I started delving. I don't know yet if I like the real Jackie or just the slightly fictionalized version. Marilyn definitely became more endearing when I read her own words or observations made by people who knew her. I realized I had always hated what people have made of Marilyn: purses with the shape of her face outlined in makeup, unattractive women in billowing white dresses and glued-on beauty marks, and especially the overrated Andy Warhol paintings a child could have done.
Jackie had simply never interested me. She was tragic and stylish and that was it. I have the feeling I'm going to have to settle for the thought and feelings she might have had. For better or worse, she was more discrete than Marilyn and we will probably never get the truthful, soul-searching self-truths about her that we find in volumes on the Sex Goddess.

Tracy Chevalier

I finished Tracy Chevalier's Falling Angels this week. I knew I would like the book since I loved her Burning Bright, which includes the bizarre poet William Blake among its characters. Falling Angels, like Burning Bright, centers around real places and events while following the lives of its fictional main characters. The two girls at the heart of the story, Maude and Lavinia, meet for the first time in a cemetery while participating in public mourning for the death of Queen Victoria.

During the course of the story, Maude and Lavinia find themselves living in a rapidly changing world. Lavinia clings to the traditions that flourished under Victoria while Maude must reconcile her ideas of family and her place in the world with the increasingly outrageous behavior of her suffragette mother. All of the important people in the girls' lives have a chance to speak for themselves and add their own information to the appearance and truth of the other characters. Lavinia's melodramatic views remind me of myself when I was younger, but her sister Ivy May, a silent figure in the background of the story, may stick with me longer.

I tend to finish books in clusters and I also finished reading Blood and Gold by Anne Rice this week. Longitude will probably be polished off along with some leftover birthday cake tonight.