Dawn Tripp with Kerri Maher

"The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like." ~ E. L. Doctorow

Acclaimed author Dawn Tripp joins us to discuss her brilliant new novel, Jackie, where she brings Jackie's own voice to life through her most intimate thoughts. No one puts things better than our beloved Chris Bohjalian: "The reason we read historical fiction is because sometimes the facts just aren’t enough. A brilliant, beautiful book like Dawn Tripp’s, Jackie, touches the soul in ways conventional biographies can’t. I devoured this novel, and felt the power of history and a remarkable woman.”

Tripp spent a decade researching and writing Jackie, including through extensive biography and article reading (a source list is included in the back of the book), travel to places Jackie visited, and reading Jackie's favorite literature to best encapsulate her voice. Dawn will discuss Jackie with Kerri Maher, author of the bestselling All You Have to Do Is Call, answer audience questions, and sign books. Books will be available for purchase at the event along with beer and wine.

ABOUT THE BOOK:
Life as a woman who goes to work because she wants to.

My life is all of these things, and it is none of these things. They continue to miss what’s right in front of them. I love books. I love the sea. I love horses. Children. Art. Ideas. History. Beauty. Because beauty blows us open to wonder.
Even the beauty that breaks your heart.

In this mesmerizing novel of the life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, bestselling author Dawn Tripp has crafted an intimate story of love and power, family and tragedy, loss and reinvention.

Jackie is the story of a woman who forged a legacy out of grief and shaped history even as she was living it—a deeply private person with a nuanced, formidable intellect. It is the story of a love affair, a complicated marriage, and the fracturing of identity that comes in the wake of unthinkable violence.

When Jackie meets the charismatic congressman Jack Kennedy in Georgetown, she is twenty-one and dreaming of France. She has won an internship at Vogue, and she thinks Kennedy is not her kind of adventure: “Too American. Too good-looking. Too boy.” Yet she is drawn to his mind, his humor, and his drive. The chemistry between them ignites. During the White House years, the love between two independent people deepens. Then, a motorcade in Dallas: “Three and a half seconds—that’s all it was—a slivered instant between the first shot, which missed the car, and the second, which did not. . . . A hypnotic burst of sunlight off her bracelet as she waved.”

This spellbinding novel is a window into the world of a woman who led many different lives: Jackie, Jacks, Jacqueline, Miss Bouvier, Mrs. Kennedy, Mrs. Onassis, Jackie O. It is at once a deeply human story and a captivating work of imagination that comes right up against what she was thinking and feeling, what she was afraid of, fought for, and believed in.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Dawn Tripp is the author of the novel Georgia, which was a national bestseller, finalist for the New England Book Award, and winner of the Mary Lynn Kotz Award for Art in Literature. She is the author of three previous novels: Game of Secrets, Moon Tide, and The Season of Open Water, which won the Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction. Her poems and essays have appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, AGNI, Conjunctions, and NPR, among others. She serves on the board of the Boston Book Festival and on the board of Gnome Surf: A non-profit Surf Therapy Organization focused on creating a culture shift towards kindness, love, and acceptance for athletes of all abilities. She graduated from Harvard and lives in Massachusetts with her sons.

Kerri Maher is the USA Today bestselling author of The Paris Bookseller, The Girl in White Gloves, The Kennedy Debutante, and, under the name Kerri Majors, This Is Not a Writing Manual: Notes for the Young Writer in the Real World. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and lives with her daughter and dog in a leafy suburb west of Boston, Massachusetts.