Q: Your novel JACKIE offers a unique, intimate portrayal of Jacqueline Kennedy. What drew you to her story, and how did you approach writing a novel rather than a traditional biography?

I came to Jackie’s story through a photograph. It’s not a well-known image, but to me it was striking. A black and white photograph of Jackie and Jack, June 1957, in the doorway of an airport. Her back is to the camera, her skirt filled with wind, a triple strand of pearls around her neck. She is standing with Jack in a doorway. He leans toward her, perhaps to say something, perhaps to kiss her goodbye. It fascinated me – that photograph and the intimacy captured between these two young people. It was clear they had little idea they were being photographed. The moment was private, a faint tension between them, a stiltedness or longing held in check, something said or left unsaid and, as well, a vulnerability, a tenderness. I found it a moment of heartbreaking beauty, a leave-taking. Jack might have been setting off on a campaign trip. Jackie was pregnant by then with Caroline. I studied this photograph, and to me, it was like fire. Over the next few days, I wrote several different passages about it, longhand, both from Jack’s and Jackie’s perspective. In the book, they each remember that moment years later, and it matters to each of them for different reasons, and in different ways.  

I became intrigued with this idea of who Jackie was, who Jack and Jackie were together–before they were myth. When they were just two people, not well known–young, newly married, with all the incipient joys and thorns that come in a complex love affair. Who were those two people? As people? Who was she?  I printed out that image of Jackie and Jack in the door of the airport, their bodies in shadow, their faces close, the bright fast rush of the white sky behind. The tentative intimacy became the heart of the story.

Q: JACKIE has received praise for its emotional depth and lyrical style. How do you navigate crafting language that resonates while keeping the narrative compelling?

Spare language with a strong cadence can, along with plot, propel a reader through a story. Longer sentences suddenly disrupted by a single word, a short phrase, or a sudden shift in pace can heighten suspense. I’m always fascinated to notice how precise and resonant language can pierce us, move us, emotionally and psychologically, and heighten our sense of empathy. A vividly cast scene can draw us more deeply into the heart of a crisis our character faces. My early drafts are often 15-20 percent longer than the final. Once I have developed the structural arc of a story, I go back through the manuscript several times, applying pressure to each paragraph, each line, stripping back any excess words, even whole passages, that slow the narrative. There is a certain ruthlessness in those later stages of revision that can make a text glow. 

Q: How did your background in poetry influence the way you approached JACKIE and your other novels?

Poetry is my first love. I have read and written poetry from the time I was a child. I studied poetry during college and in my twenties. I took Seamus Heaney’s poetry seminar at Harvard and he was the teacher who first pointed out how many of my poems seemed to have a strong narrative component. Early drafts of my first novel actually began as an extended narrative poem that I slowly built into a story. I worked on that book for seven years, and although it was never published, that failed book was where I learned to write fiction. 

I still write my first drafts longhand, in notebooks, and most of those early pages are written as fragments, with line breaks, bits of poetry, emotion, reflection, half-passages where I focus on the language of a thought or a moment, a realization or the turning point of a scene. I often write this early raw material in free verse without punctuation. For me, writing that way–messy, disordered– allows me to keep the early story free and open to change. The order of the narrative emerges from those notebooks. I then craft the narrative arc along a five act structure, or a seven act structure. Once I have the spine of the story essentially clear, I start writing. 

Q: You’ve written multiple historical and literary novels—what is your research process like, and how do you balance fact with fiction? 

The research process changes book to book, but it always begins with immersive reading of non-fiction sources. When you read multiple biographies of a historical figure, and you read them in succession, you notice that while the salient facts and events are the same, each biographical portrait is an interpretation depending on what themes and dimension of a life the writer has chosen to explore. 

I researched Jackie for years before I began to write. My early drafts of the book had footnotes–I wanted to be able to tether every choice I made back to the historical record. The more I read about Jackie, the more I realized how she has not always been considered through the full range and scope of her mind.  She was brilliant, strategic. A nuanced formidable intellect and a legendary wit. She spoke multiple languages, memorized long poems, bit her nails, and read the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr for fun. She once remarked that her sartorial ambition was to “resemble an Ionic column.” She was an excellent slalom water-skier. At the JFK library archives there is a video of Jackie waterskiing holding her four-year-old daughter in her arms while she skied. Again and again, I would discover these quirky details and granular bits of anecdote, fact. I became increasingly driven to create a portrait that would be at once drawn from the historical record and, for a reader, revelatory. In that early research, I read everything I could find that Caroline and John had publicly written or said about their mother. I sought out accounts shared by Jackie’s colleagues and friends. I began to gather notes from reflections and things Jackie herself had written or said. I was curious to see if I could construct the arc of a story grounded in what she loved; her passion for art, ideas, culture, language, history, children, the natural world; her care and driving commitment to her children. Her curiosity, her faith in life-long learning. 

Those were the dimensions of Jackie that were interesting to me. Who she was as a creative, an intellect, an athlete, a mother. What inspired her. What drove her. I was intrigued to see if I could map the narrative arc of a story through the evolution of her intellectual life, and her intention.

E.L. Doctorow once said, “The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.” In JACKIE, that interstice is what I wanted to explore– the space between what took place and what might have; what happened to her and how the world perceived it vs. how she might have experienced it. 

Q: Do you have a particular writing ritual or process that helps you get into the creative flow?

I read. Constantly. I love to read. Poetry. Novels. Plays. Contemporary stories. Translations. I love history and mythology. Whenever I get stuck in a story, I reread authors I love. W.S. Merwin. Michael Ondaatje. Marguerite Duras. Anne Carson. I love the risks Carson takes in her retellings. Her literary vision is so bold, and every time I reread her, I find something new. When it’s warm enough, I also swim. I learned to surf when I was in my forties, but the ocean sport I love most is open water swimming. Being in the ocean and the waves is always a reset. 

Q: Many of your books center on strong, complex female protagonists. What draws you to these characters, and do you see a common thread between them?

In a letter to her friend Sherwood Anderson, Georgia [O'Keeffe] once wrote, “no man has been written down the way the men have written me down.” She was referring to contemporary critical reviews of her art and the eroticized gendered language assigned to her abstractions that, she believed, missed the force and power of her vision, her artistic intention, and what she was seeking to do in her abstract work. I value texts–both non-fiction and highly researched historical fiction–that strive to contribute to the conversation reexamining misunderstood or misrepresented female figures of history. That’s what I have worked to do in both JACKIE and GEORGIA. I am particularly curious about the complex and intimate relationship between a woman and power. Jackie was a woman who shaped American history even as she lived it. She was also a woman surrounded by currents of power. She had to learn to navigate that power, and ultimately harness it in order to forge a life on her own terms. 

Q: Your writing often weaves together history, art, and deeply personal stories. How do you decide which elements to emphasize in a given book?

Such a great question! The question of emphasis isn’t, for me, a cerebral decision, but rather one that emerges by spending time with the story, and knowing the characters, their lives, what’s at stake for them, what they are hiding, what they love and fear to lose, what they long for and believe. Jackie’s passions for history, culture, literature, and art were deeply personal–and integral to the evolution of her intellectual life and the choices that she made. 

Q: What advice would you give to aspiring writers, particularly novelists/essayists looking to blend history and fiction?

In the two biographical books I have written based on women from history–JACKIE and GEORGIA–I felt committed to hewing to the historical record. I didn’t want to bend timelines, or invent characters or facts. We sometimes imagine that fiction and non-fiction are neatly divided; we imagine fiction is “make believe” and biography is “true.” But even non-fiction accounts are an interpretation, based on the selection of facts, the elision of facts, how the facts are arranged and where the writer has chosen to place the emphasis. With both GEORGIA and with JACKIE, I didn’t want to play fast and loose with the truth, and with Jackie, I felt particularly compelled to build a portrait of her through the lens of the things she valued: her nuanced and formidable intellect, her care and commitment to her family and children; her integrity, her love of books history, art, horses, the sea. To me the most important thing any writer has to do–whether they have published or are aspiring to–is to find the story they are on fire to tell, the story they believe in; to be intentional and accountable to the form, needs and parameters of that story, and to keep writing. 

Q: What’s next for you? Are you working on another novel or exploring new creative avenues?

I am working on another novel. I love writing book-length works because I love living for an extended stretch of time in the world of a story. My next novel is not set in the 20th century, but like JACKIE and like GEORGIA, the story focuses on a young woman and her complex relationship with power.