Jackie and Me is a novel published by Louis Bayard in 2022. It is a fictionalized story based on the early life of Jacqueline Bouvier who would go to marry John F. Kennedy and become First Lady for the United States. Bayard carved out a niche for himself this genre, producing a series of novels based on the lives of iconic figures from history ranging from Abraham Lincoln to Tiny Tim from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.
Rather than focusing on much-covered “Camelot” period when JFK was elected President or her later life as Jackie Kennedy Onassis following her controversial second marriage, Bayard’s focus is the titular character’s life when she was simply Jackie Bouvier. The book begins in 1951 when the debutante daughter from a fairly wealthy family meets the scion of a very wealthy and influential family with political aspirations. It is a tale of the courtship of Jackie by John with the underlying tension being that Jackie comes to realize his intentions may be more about his political ambitions than his actual feelings for her.
Much like the characters themselves, the book’s record of reviews seemingly aligns political divide representing much of the country. In other words, the novel received plenty of attention from larger national periodicals with larger subscriptions while it was virtually ignored in the book review sections of smaller publications with a more conservative-leading subscription based. The Washington Post chose Jackie and Me as one of their 50 Notable Works of Fiction for 2022. Glowing reviews also appeared in such widely circulated magazines and newspapers as People Magazine, the New York Times, Kirkus Review, and Publisher’s Weekly. In fact, People Magazine recognized the work with inclusion on its Best Books of Summer list.
Notably, these official reviews of the book are accompanied in the official marketing material found on bookstore websites mostly by praise from individual authors rather than attributions to lesser-known regional publications.
