Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Memoirs

FINDING JACKIE

Oline Eaton

A Life Reinvented

Perfect for readers who loved Carly Simon's Touched By the Sun: My Friendship with Jackie and the audience who enjoyed Natalie Portman's fresh take in Pablo Larraín's critically-acclaimed film, Jackie, this is a revitalized look at Jaqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, a feminist icon who has more in common with the modern woman than we've been led to believe.

After her death, the Kennedy's took control of Jackie's public image, morphing her into the figure we know today: universally loved and remembered as dignified, classy, a superior wife, mother, decorator, and hostess. But what story lies beneath that of the former First Lady? What is the true tale of the woman who wore leather miniskirts, grew her hair long, and married infamous Greek shipping tycoon Ari Onassis?

Scholar and writer Oline Eaton charts the taboo and often dismissed story of Jackie, the life of a woman reinventing herself time and time again. In FINDING JACKIE, she follows the "star of life" through her tragedies and triumphs with all the urgency and uncertainty she faced. Revealed is a Jackie the world has never seen, the Jackie who climbed pyramids, held fascinating jobs, lived abroad, married a scandalous man, saw a sex movie with him in a theater, and then judo-flipped a photographer on her way out. She frolicked braless and barefoot in Capri. She saved Grand Central in New York City. She stepped outside the rarefied world she'd been born into and exemplified the cultural changes of the 1960s and 70s.

With newly released archival evidence, FINDING JACKIE illuminates the disconnect between the public story and what is now known of Jackie Kennedy Onassis' actual private life. Jackie has long been celebrated for her style rather than her substance but, when set in its full historical context, her story resonates today.

Oline Eaton teaches first year writing as a full-time lecturer at Howard University and as an adjunct at New York University. Her academic research examines how celebrity life-stories circulate in American culture over time. She has been writing about Jackie Onassis for over twenty years, and her academic research on the subject has been published in Biography, Celebrity Studies Journal, the Journal of American Culture, the Journal of American Studies, and Gender, Place and Culture.

Available products
Book Published 2023-01-10 by Diversion

Comments

The best book about JKO I've ever read. Not Jackie the icon but Jackie the woman - in all her restless, spiky glory.

Oline Eaton tells the Jackie Onassis story with riveting precision and a warm, intuitive sense of how the enigmas of a celebrity's life can entrance us. Eaton manages to move beyond myth and gossip - however delectable - into a fact-based assessment of the traumas, conflicts, and heroism of the woman whom we all knew as simply 'Jackie.' This book's insights bring Jackie into the 21st century; in Eaton's responsive, empathic depiction of this historical figure, we can begin to grasp a splendor - a charisma, an accomplishment, a finesse - we hadn't yet adequately reckoned.

Finding Jackie is an utterly original and beautifully written perspective on the former First Lady. Oline Eaton has achieved something remarkable, casting Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, a woman we thought we knew, in a completely new light, putting her in the context of her times - and ours.

In Finding Jackie, Oline Eaton has illuminated the timeline of the iconic Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis with forgotten and overlooked episodes that are telling and vibrant, encapsulating her complicated existence as a private person and aspiration mythology as a public persona. The author places Jackie within a substantive popular culture context, giving a broad grasp of just why this individual was so important in her times and yet timelessly endures in the collective imagination.

Her name once seemed to float 'electric on the air,' as Andy Warhol said of Jackie. Oline Eaton captures the electricity and explains it in this exceptional biography of a woman who dazzled, inspired, and suffered. This is the rare biography that makes the familiar seem fresh with deep research, delightful prose, and unerring insight. Readers will find Jackie more interesting than ever, and that's saying a great deal.

John F. Kennedy said: 'What makes journalism so fascinating and biography so interesting is the struggle to answer that single question: What's he like? No more struggling on the subject of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Oline Eaton's Finding Jackie penetrates the mystique and unravels the myth with the best Jackie biography ever. Brava, Brava, Brava!

A necessary biography contextualizing Jackie, an enigmatic embodiment of American womanhood and all its multitudes.

Finding Jackie is an extraordinary achievement - a fresh, riveting exploration of one of the world's most written-about women. With great ingenuity and compassion, and in beautiful prose, Oline Eaton brings this fascinating figure to a new generation, and explodes dusty ideas about what biography is and can be. Anyone interested in celebrity, fame, media, and myth-making, or merely women in general, will find much to delight in here.

Jackie Kennedy has long reigned as America's best known, but least understood First Lady. In this engaging narrative, Oline Eaton reveals the thoughtful and sensitive woman that was obscured by her celebrity.

Informed by the latest scholarship and with an irreverent eye for tabloid excess, Oline Eaton achieves the remarkable in this book. She turns Jackie into super-fuel for a new generation. She also makes finding Jackie fun.