D.C. writer Oline Eaton has a doctorate from King’s College London. She teaches writing at Howard University. Photo by Stacey Lewis

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Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis has occupied the mind of local author Oline Eaton since she was 12 years old, the year the former first lady passed away.

Some three decades later, Eaton has published Finding Jackie: A Life Reinvented, which looks with compassion and insight into the glorious and tragic life of “Jackie O.”

Although many other biographies of Jacqueline Onassis exist, this one focuses on her resilience.

In a recent interview with the Beacon, Eaton said, “The book reveals that Jacqueline Kennedy was someone living with trauma [after the assassinations of her husband, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK) and brother-in-law Robert Kennedy], and trying to rebuild a livable and rewarding life while navigating that trauma…before human trauma responses were really understood.”

She hopes her book “teases out the dimensions of that survival, so that we can more clearly see how Jackie struggled and how she survived.”

Eaton holds a doctorate degree from King’s College in London and degrees from Mississippi State University and the University of Chicago. She lives in Washington, D.C., and teaches first-year writing at Howard University.

Admiring a survivor

Eaton was inspired from a young age by the tenacity of the former first lady.

“Jackie has kind of been like a fairy godmother…There are certain historical figures or celebrities whose stories provide templates or shimmering possibilities of ways to live,” she said.

“For whatever reason, when I was 12 years old, Jackie Kennedy’s story did that for me. It showed a way to survive trauma and death, but also of how to live — how to embrace the chaos and seek adventure, try new things and go places and explore.”

Inspired by the famous woman, Eaton became curious about the lesser-known parts of Jackie O’s life. “There were gaps in the story that I wanted to know about, which also led to me writing about her,” the author said.

“I wouldn’t be the writer I am had I not spent the last 20 years trying to tell the story I couldn’t find, the story I wanted to read as a girl, the story it seemed no one else was going to write, even though it was so essential to me.”

Research included yacht tour

So, Eaton read all she could about Jackie Kennedy — dozens of Jackie bios; the papers and documents in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston; the former first lady’s personal letters; articles she published.

She interviewed, among others, Jackie’s stepbrother Hugh Auchincloss and women’s rights advocate Gloria Steinem.

Of course, no biography can fully capture a life, Eaton conceded.

“We can never know who someone was by reading about them. We’re all far more complicated than any one book or a thousand magazine articles can ever convey, thank goodness!”

During her research, Eaton also took a tour of the luxury yacht on which Jackie sailed with her second husband, Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis.

Just as it has now been reported that first husband JFK had several extramarital affairs (of which Jackie Kennedy became aware), Onassis was known to be in a longtime relationship with opera icon Maria Callas, which continued during his marriage to Jackie.

After the death of billionaire Onassis in 1975, Jackie took a job as an editor at Viking Press in New York City for $200 a week.

Eaton said that before taking the Viking job in 1976 (and for a time after, while she was living in an apartment on Fifth Avenue), Jackie contemplated a run for the U.S. Senate. She died in 1994.

Eaton noted that poet Stephen Spender once asked the former first lady what she thought her greatest accomplishment was.

“She replied it was that, after some rather difficult times, she was still relatively sane,” Eaton said.

A personal reflection

On a personal note, in the summer of 1980, when I [Robert Friedman] was a reporter for the San Juan Star in Puerto Rico, I was invited to cover a fundraiser being held in the Brooklyn home of author Norman Mailer.

When I arrived at Mailer’s book-filled apartment, Jackie Kennedy was standing out on the balcony alone, a cocktail glass in hand. Accompanying me was my wife, Ginny, who was in her sixth month of pregnancy.

As soon as Kennedy saw my wife and her condition, she walked inside and greeted her with a warm smile. She gave me a nod of recognition; we had met on one of her earlier visits to Puerto Rico. The nod said, “We’ll talk politics later.”

Instead, Jackie spoke softly and caringly to Ginny about babies.

That is my memory of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who knew what was really important and meaningful in life.

The official launch of Finding Jackie took place on February 2 at 7:30 p.m. at Lost City Books in Adams Morgan. Eaton will do several readings throughout the city. For more information, visit findingjackie.com.