Finding Jackie: A Life Reinvented
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Jackie. One name was all you needed. A paragon of femininity, fashion, ideal American wifeliness and motherhood, she was also fiercely independent, the first of the modern First Ladies. Then her husband was murdered, changing her world and ours.
Traumatized and exposed, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy nonetheless built a new life for herself in an America similarly haunted by upheaval. She dated and traveled ceaselessly before scandalizing the world by marrying a foreigner, living abroad, climbing pyramids, cruising the oceans, and wandering Europe braless and barefoot.
But the story of Jackieβs reinvention has been culturally erased. In Finding Jackie, author Oline Eaton pieces it back together.
Jackieβs storyβtreated like the national soap opera and transmitted through newspapers, magazines, images, and TV during the 1960s and 1970sβbecame wired into Americaβs emotional grid. Here, in Finding Jackie, sheβs rediscovered as an adventurer, a wanderer, a woman, and an idea in whom, for over half a century, many Americans and people around the globe have deeply, fiercely wanted to believe.
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Oline Eaton is a scholar of biographical writing and a writer of creative nonfiction, whose work examines the intersections of celebrity, feelings, feminism, language, and trauma. She holds degrees from Mississippi State University, the University of Chicago, and Kingβs College London, and teaches first year writing as a full-time lecturer at Howard University. She lives in Washington, DC with her cats, Claude and Marcel.
Jo Anna Perrin is an accomplished audiobook narrator and actor who has appeared in film and television as well as on stage in New York and Los Angeles. Independent of her acting and voiceover work, she is a published author and a professional photographer.
