Forget that this book is about a member of America's so-called Royal Family. Although the glamour and privilege of being a Kennedy are woven through many pages of this luminous memoir, it's a testament to Christina Haag's loving, scrupulous memory; her understanding of the universals of love among childhood-friends-turning-pals-turning-soulmates; and her romantic's limning of the piercing Aha! moments of coming or age in a very precise time and place (it doesn't hurt that it's a glamorous one), that all cliched associations with The Kennedys fade as you read. You are reading a story of self-discovery, and mutual self-discovery, and rapture, in a finely described, very particular milieu.
The story opens with Christina and John circling each other as uniformed private school peers in the elite but constricted world of MAD MEN Era uber-Upper East Side. You feel the world changing as Vatican II and The Sixties opens her eyes, as she wanders two blocks, six blocks, then thrillingly subways down to the once-verboten Village to realize her love and her destiny: Acting. Like the best of Manhattan-based coming of age memoirs, the exotic rituals of one tiny class of people are painstakingly but never judgmentally rendered, and the city's uniquely tight geography - a mile is like an ocean! -- makes the change of world on that life-stuffed little island amusingly and plausibly epic.
The young John -- open, eager, but a bit hapless among his savvier young peers -- turns out to be Christina's housemate at Brown (Christiane Amanpour is a third; what a house!) - and they Roommate Cute, including a fight over the night's menu. But something is inevitably pulling these two together -- and we know enough about them and LIKE them enough to greet their eventual full-blown committed love affair (launched when they play opposite one another in an Irish play) with forward-leaning sympathy, respect -- and fascination. They travel - man, do they travel! -- far and wide, with innkeepers and hoteliers always opening the doors with a young-royals-greeting smile..but their blithe, adventurous privilege (and bravery in roiling nature) never makes you jealous; they are, thanks to Christina's trustworthy emphasis, too fully realized as characters, too likeable and decent, and, each in their own way, too vulnerable, for jealousy to cloud your enjoyment of their love affair. Not an easy feat.
Haag weaves in the "Kennedy" parts with such bone-deep comfort and naturalness, they have a striking intimacy but never seem preening at all. Her scenes at Jackie's Martha's Vineyard house are so personal and revealing they're gasp-worthy,but there's no sense of trespass, of exploitation. And here, as everywhere, what counts is the character development. That the once-too-rambunctious John is still smarting from earlier unwelcome incursions on her mother's private time (so much so that he uncharacteristically lashes out at Christina) is what we see. That Jackie let John have his girflriend spend the night in his room because she wanted to raise a very different (and better) young man than his womanizing-in-a-sex-negative-world father is an observation as natural and sensible as it is understated.
Inevitably, the burdens of being too venerated for his lineage while trying to make his own way, as his own man (and the temptations of a too-handsome, too-famous young man in a Page Six world) start cropping up, and hindering the impressively nurtured relationship of a couple who, in different circumstances, would keep growing together. (You WILL set down the book at some point, sigh, and say: Damn! He SHOULD have married her!) Inevitably, they break up. But no one is the bad guy here because Haag has portrayed John with such plausible humanity and aching specificity (and herself with wise measure -- again, no Hey-I-got-THIS-guy braggadacio). That we know what is to come (and, wisely, Haag places her response to his death earlier in the book; she doesn't risk melodrama OR anticlimax by keeping it in strict sequence) is made all the more poignant by our understanding that this charming but pretty minimally spoiled young man could not beat the misinformation, stuffed in his face from childhood, that he could take risks others could NOT take and walk away unscathed.
Like many Americans, I cried when I turned on the TV that summer morning in the '90s and heard the astonishing news of his death. He had always seemed so damn sweet! Guileless, almost -- well, guileless AND foxy, if one can be both. That hunch I had about him was justified -- vivified -- by a scene in the book: John, then in high school, has excitedly spent his allowance money buying his mother not one dress but two (!) for her birthday. Of course, he -- a klutzy young male, despite it all; endearingly not knowing much about fashion, every privilege in his life notwithstanding -- he bought them at a downscale chain dress store, the kind in which receptionists from Queens might shop. "Mommy loved them!" he reports to Christina. (I'm doing this scene from memory; forgive.) "She loved them!" Did she wear them, this perennial # 1 on the Best Dressed List? "Oh, yes!" he says. "All the time. But only inside the apartment."
If there is a better description of a very good mother and dear dear teenage son, I challenge you to bring them to me.
Thank you -- and Brava, Christina.
-- Sheila Weller
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Reviews with images
Dignity is never out of place
Exquisite writing, so lovely of Christina to share her love and little of her pain. A beautiful love letter to John, full of dignity, touching memories and grace. Also loved how gentle she was with Jackie.
Top reviews from other countries
Johanna Samuel
A deeply moving, yet unsentimental love story - haunting and exhilarating.
Reviewed in Canada on April 10, 2020Marianna C. Travlos
A poignant memoir of life, love and loss
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 18, 2017
Carrick Ryan
Full of heart and soul with a touch of magic
Reviewed in Australia on August 25, 2021vanille T
livre que je suis curieuse de lire!
Reviewed in France on December 19, 2015