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November Challenge: A book you love.
My favorite book this year is Camera Girl: The Coming of Age of Jackie Bouvier Kennedy by Carl Sferrazza Anthony.
This charming biography concentrates on a very specific time in Jackie's life: from ages 19 to 24. It starts with Vassar and ends with her wedding to JFK, the day she became a public figure.
She began that five year period by making repeat trips to Europe. She forged a lifelong friendship with an elderly Irish priest, boarded with a widowed countess in Paris and became a regular at the theater and jazz clubs, and (my favorite part) was actually detained by the Russian embassy in Vienna because they suspected her of espionage!
When she returned stateside for good, she became engaged to and then broke up with a stockbroker, in large part because she did not want to be an upper middle class housewife. She preferred The Washington Herald, where she went from The Inquiring Camera Girl to a columnist with a byline. (Funny that a woman who would come to loathe the press found such satisfaction working for a newspaper.) Important though her job was to her, she had to give it up when she married because it was the 1950s and that's what women did. She believed that being the wife of a politician would be worth it and, as she wrote privately to Father Leonard, she had finally fallen in love.
This sensitive, insightful book got me wondering about my own mother and those years between high school and matrimony. I know there were no trips to Paris or Vienna for my mother, but I don't know what she did do during that period. The way my mom told her life story, nothing much happened to her until she met my dad. Of course, that's how most biographies treat that period of JBKO's life, too. This book makes me sorry I never asked about it when I could.
I like to hear my Dad's stories from his younger days. When he retired from playing the organ at the Catholic church (after 70+ years) he was interviewed several times about how he got his start. I learned so much from those interviews!
ReplyDeleteThat Isley Bros song, as was true of most Holland-Dozier-Holland songs, was covered by the Supremes, which is from whom I first heatd it.
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