Review: “The Editor” by Steven Rowley

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📚 TE offers a fictionalized account of Jackie’s life in the years she was a force in the New York publishing world. Not to oversimplify such a complex woman, but it seemed to me that this could be classified as a time period when Jackie was living for Jackie and Jackie alone.

📚 TE is told from the POV from one of Jackie’s authors. It’s not billed as a mystery but there is a bit of a human mystery tucked away in there. Why do we turn out the way we do? What secrets do we choose to keep?

📚 The Camelot mythology loomed over Jackie. While intensely private, she did try to step out of its shadow without running directly into the glare of another spotlight. She was painfully aware that she would always inhabit a contradiction: she could never escape Camelot, but equally (despite public desire) it could never be rebuilt. 

📚 I think everyone knows and admires Jackie’s dignity and strength in the aftermath of JFK’s assassination. I didn’t know about their son Patrick Kennedy who was born August 7, 1963 and died August 9. That was just 10 weeks before the assassination. It puts Jackie’s strength under even greater strain than much of the public was even aware. My God. She was already suffering a deeply personal loss of a child, and then was subsumed by an intensely public loss that was both a personal and national tragedy.

📚 Other books I’ve read by Steven Rowley:

“Guncle”

“Lily and the Octopus” (post coming up)