it is like a nesting doll, all of it. my life with jackie, my writing about jackie. so that when i read the pages i have written about jackie, the whole book i have written on her life, it unpacks a whole series of memories of my own.
where i was when i wrote that sentence.
who i was sitting next to at the british library when i found that quote. (invariably, always, obviously, nanette.)
what i didn’t know was about to happen when i was in that archive.
the feeling of the wind in my hair and the blue blue sky above as i walked home after wandering round the yacht.
it is her life and it is mine.
they are, by this point, so braided up.
*
after reading the full draft of my book for the first time in two years, i complain to a friend that i was so briefly content before being consumed by exhaustion. as though the door to every single thing that has happened in the last five years that i would really rather not think about had been flung open and they all pressed against me, demanding attention, the whole lot of them requiring a working through, the energy for which i do not have.
omg, she sagely tells me, it’s like you just looked at a decade of old facebook photos. like you just watched everyone age in a blur. of course you would now need time to mourn.
*
i think about how young i was when all of this started.
twelve.
TWELVE.
i vividly remember the shame associated with it.
of caring that much.
never mind that, when i made my announcement to my parents and their friend who was visiting from out of town, during a dinner at the taco bell, that i had decided to collect vintage jackie LIFE magazines, they were all 100% on board.
(in my memory, if i’m being entirely honest, they clapped. but that sounds a bit much, even for my family’s ambient level of ostentatiously excessive enthusiasm so, even though i remember it clearly, i imagine this is probably not true.)
it was nonetheless embarrassing, to care that much.
it has always, always been embarrassing to care this much.
*
vivid memory: somewhere around ’95-’96, my father picked up me and a friend with whom i rode the school bus from the dollar theater where we’d seen some charlie sheen film. when we were driving her home, she sat in the front seat and i was in the back. they were talking about something and garebear, bragging on me, mentioned how i had this cool magazine collection, AND I DIED.
i don’t think i actually told my dad to shut up but i shut that shit down real fast.
because it was 1995/1996. we were teenagers.
it was not cool to care.
i’m aware now of how i have always worked to inhibit and conceal how much i care. and how it has always, always felt mildly violent to have to do that.
*
i wrote all of the above in july 2019, but it’s held up.
*
i write about real lives, because i think real lives hit different.
maybe this is just because, my whole life, they’ve hit different for me.
it’s been maybe ten or fifteen years since i first characterized my relationship with biography as one of self-medicating. it is no accident that my academic research is all about how people use stories of real lives to navigate their own.
i write about this because i have done this. and i want to understand why.
i was twelve and i read about her and saw something i needed and i took it.
she was a way of being, but also a way out. of whatever it was i was in– girlhood, depression, grief, violence, america.
*
i’ve dreamed about her very few times. i wrote about the original one awhile back.
i don’t think i’ve written about the last one.
in the dream, the man i was romantically entangled with at the time and i were leaving an evangelical church. (god knows what we were doing there.) we were walking through what i assumed to be new york city and, suddenly, at the end of the street, bracketed between two buildings, there she was.
wearing these red pants.
dear reader, i take absolutely no pride in the fact that my first thought upon seeing jackie onassis in this dream was that her butt was bigger than i had imagined.
and somehow we (or i- i should say- because from this point on i was no longer aware of the man i was romantically entangled with; i had an awareness only of her), though we were walking down a parallel street, wound up in her path, and she came striding up to me.
not aggressively, not all HOW DARE YOU WRITE THAT BOOK, but just in the manner that you would approach someone on the street, someone you knew and had been expecting.
she was in her 50s. a cigarette was in her hand. her lipstick was hot pink.
she was getting into politics, she told me. and desperate to read consuela’s memoir.
i told her i was nobody and i couldn’t get it for her.
because this was a reference, i recognized within this dream, to suzanne sugarbaker’s maid on the 80s tv classic designing women. who has apparently written a memoir that jackie onassis desperately needs to read.
