Farewell, Jackie

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always had a fascination with history, with historical figures of all kinds… but primarily, with US Presidents and their families. I’ve read countless books—autobiographies, biographies, trivia compilations.

I find it’s most fascinating to read about the remarkable women who lived alongside the presidents: their mothers, sisters and wives often have incredible stories to tell, and yet as a consequence of the age in which they live, their own talents and skills were put on a shelf; they were too often footnotes in history.

The story of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis is one I’ve read about more than once. Her incomparable style is fascinating to me (I have the sunglasses, after all!) and I think she suffered terrible tragedies that were magnified by her public status.

So I picked up Farewell, Jackie: A Portrait of Her Final Days by Edward Klein, a New York Times bestselling author. And frankly, he didn’t impress me.

His watered-down portrayal of the last six months of Mrs. Onassis’s life was distilled into less than 200 pages, and is primarily a rework of his previous writings. (He actually has an additional ten pages of notes at the end of the book, explaining his sources, many of which are his own writing!)

Klein also has a nauseating habit of referring to himself in the third person throughout the book as “this author.”

In short: don’t bother. There are far better biographies of Mrs. Onassis.