In this mesmerizing novel about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, acclaimed author Dawn Tripp has crafted an intimate story of love and power, family and tragedy, loss and reinvention.
“ A brilliant, beautiful book [that] touches the soul. ” — Chris Bohjalian, New York Times bestselling author of The Princess of Las Vegas
The world has divided my life into three:
Life with Jack
Life with Onassis
Life as a woman who goes to work because she wants to.
My life is all of these things, and it is none of these things. They continue to miss what’ s right in front of them. I love books. I love the sea. I love horses. Children. Art. Ideas. History. Beauty. Because beauty blows us open to wonder.
Even the beauty that breaks your heart.
Jackie is the story of a woman— deeply private with a nuanced, formidable intellect— who forged a legacy out of grief and shaped history even as she was living it. It is the story of a love affair, a complicated marriage, and the fracturing of identity that comes in the wake of unthinkable violence.
When Jackie meets the charismatic congressman Jack Kennedy in Georgetown, she is twenty-one and dreaming of France. She has won an internship at Vogue. Kennedy, she thinks, is not her kind of adventure: “ Too American. Too good-looking. Too boy. ” Yet she is drawn to his mind, his humor, his drive. The chemistry between them ignites. During the White House years, the love between two independent people deepens. Then, a motorcade in Dallas: “ Three and a half seconds— that’ s all it was— a slivered instant between the first shot, which missed the car, and the second, which did not. . . . A hypnotic burst of sunlight off her bracelet as she waved. ”
This vivid, exquisitely written novel is at once a captivating work of the imagination and a window into the world of a woman who led many lives: Jackie, Jacks, Jacqueline, Miss Bouvier, Mrs. Kennedy, Jackie O.
