WWW.WEDNESDAY

 

WWW. WEDNESDAY asks three questions to prompt you to speak bookishly. To participate, and to see how other book lovers responded, click here. 

PS I no longer participate in WWW.WEDNESDAY via that link because her blog won't accept Blogger comments. I mention this only to save you the frustration I experienced trying to link up.

1. What are you currently reading? One Dog Night by David Rosenfelt. The book I recently finished, while good, was a downer. And so I need a dose of distraction. Who better to deliver it than my fantasy boyfriend, Andy Carpenter, in this, the 9th book of the series?

Why do I love Andy so much? Because he loves baseball and classic rock, has a smart mouth, is a lawyer who only works when he wants to, and loves animals. Especially his dog, Tara. In this volume, we get some of Tara's backstory. Up until now, all we've known about her is that she is brilliant and beautiful, and that she was already an adult dog in full bloom of fabulousness when she entered Andy's life. Noah Galloway is a man in trouble who is not only in need of a lawyer, he was Tara's owner before Andy.

 

2. What did you recently finish reading? Once Upon a Time by Elizabeth Beller. Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy is almost always just a footnote in Kennedy lore. Often a mystery, sometimes a villain. Here she gets her own biography.

So much of the book explores how hard the press was on her in real time, how vastly her friends' recollections differ from her icy public persona. That's undoubtedly true. Narratives were spun every time she left or re-entered the Tribeca loft she shared with America's Prince, and the truth didn't really matter. She was a commodity to be sold, and her feelings didn't matter. She became angry -- very angry -- by how she was treated and depressed by the public's misconception of her. As presented by Beller, her responses were completely understandable. They were not Jackie's responses -- Jackie knew how to rise above the adulation/attention/slander -- but Jackie was sui generis. Carolyn was a separate person. I'm surprised to say I think I would have liked her. I feel bad right now for Meghan Markle.

I also came away with mad respect for the Bessette girls. Daughters of divorce who grew up middle class, nothing (except maybe beauty) was given to them. Let's look at their careers.

•  Lauren Bessette (who died with Carolyn and John) was an economics grad. Fluent in Madarin (!) she spent four years at Morgan Stanley's Hong Kong office before returning to New York, where she became a Vice President at their flagship office on Broadway

•  Lisa Bessette (Lauren's twin and the surviving sister) is now nearly 60 years old. She holds a PhD, lectures on art history at the University of Michigan and consults at the University's art museum.

•  Carolyn graduated from Boston University and worked her way up through the ranks at Calvin Klein. She went from retail sales to personal shopper to director of fashion show production to publicist. Her salary was $100,000/year when she resigned in 1996. That would be over $200,000/year in today's dollars. Not Kennedy-level wealth, but it certainly made her a well paid woman in a glamorous, competitive profession. It made me sad that she had to give up her job at CK because advertisers at John's George magazine thought it was somehow a conflict for ad space.

3. What will you read next? Don't know.