Recommendsday: Novelised Real People II

We’ve made it to the middle of the week, and today I’ve got a follow up to my post from 2021 about novelised versions of real people’s lives (not to be confused with the one about real people solving crimes from a couple of months back. This has taken quite a while to pull together because I’ve read a few that I really didn’t like and didn’t want to write about to get to this point, but this is still a two I liked and one I didn’t situation, but the one I’ve written is a not for me situation as opposed to being a terrible book!

Jackie by Dawn Tripp*

I’ve read a fair few books, fiction and non-fiction, about Jackie Kennedy, so I was interested to read Dawn Tripp’s novel. Unsurprisingly most of this deals with Jackie’s life with Jack and immediately after, but it does a pretty good job of creating a real woman behind the myth and capturing the different aspects of her personality to make you understand why she made the decisions that she did and how she dealt with being at the centre of one of the most notorious moments in American twentieth century history. I have definitely read a lot worse versions of this story. I’m looking at you Jackie and Maria Callas novel.

Peggy by Rebecca Godfrey with Leslie Jamison*

This is a novel about Peggy Guggenheim, covering moments of her life almost in snapshots in a first person stream of consciousness style that feels like it’s trying to be as avant-garde as the art that she is famous for collecting. Now I really struggled with this – despite having read Judith Mackerell’s The Unfinished Palazzo (about her and some other owners of the building that became the home of her art collection) and so having some knowledge of her life I found it hard to follow not just because of the stream of conscious writing style but because of the way it handles dialogue as well as the jumps through time. I know Peggy to have had an interesting life, but being inside her head the whole time with her thoughts makes it hard to see her actions in any context and is exhausting. This was clearly a mammoth labour of love and writing for Rebecca Godfrey who died before it was completed, and an epic task for Leslie Jamison to take over and finish it, but it’s clearly not one for me.

The Aviator’s Wife by Melanie Benjamin

This is the story of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the shy daughter of an ambassador who married the world’s most famous man of his day – Charles Lindbergh, the first man to fly across the Atlantic. Anne also becomes a pilot and flies alongside her husband as his navigator as they explore the world. But the pressure of being the world’s most famous couple is hard to withstand – and tragedy hits their family as well (for those of you who have read Murder on the Orient Express, Agatha Christie took elements of what happened to the Lindberghs when creating the Armstrongs) and Anne will have to figure out who she is in her own right. I found Anne a bit of a challenge at times in the early part of the story, but it’s fascinating to watch her grow into herself and obviously she had an incredibly eventful life that put her at the heart of some really key moments in history.

Happy Humpday!