Book Description Review “A delicious, gripping recreation of a compelling mystery told in a voice full of secrets and charm. Jesse Kornbluth has written a page-turner brought alive by expert social detail and poignant insights.”—TINA BROWN, CEO of Tina Brown Live Media and author of the #1 New York Times-bestseller, The Diana Chronicles “A ‘secret history’ as poised, witty, and elegantly seductive as its heroine. Jesse Kornbluth’s means are deceptively simple—a deftly imagined diary and its Pale Fire-like footnotes—but his accomplishment is all the more devastating for that. JFK and Mary Meyer: A Love Story delivers all the immense glamour, corruption, and intrigue of the Kennedy moment in a toothsome chocolate box of a book. You’ll want to gobble it up in a single sitting.” —STEVEN SCHIFF, writer/producer of the TV series The Americans “Sad, salacious, plausible and wise, Jesse Kornbluth’s triumph of painstaking research and sympathetic imagination has produced a devastating cocktail of a novel, hypnotically readable and real as climate change. Truly an amazing achievement.” —NICHOLAS MEYER, author of the New York Times bestseller The Seven-Per-Cent Solution “Jesse Kornbluth’s fact-based novel is a quiet tour de force, a cross between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Noel Coward, with more than a touch of John Le Carre.” —DEBORAH DAVIS, author of Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and Her Washington Post Empire “A rumored affair, a burned diary, and a string of what-ifs are the potent ingredients Jesse Kornbluth blends to create this heady cocktail of a novel. Under the fizz and froth lies a deeper tale about self-awareness and self-delusion, power and patronage, and—oh yes—murder and intrigue.” —CHRISTINA BAKER KLINE, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Orphan Train and A Piece of the World “Ah, the pleasures of following mature protagonists who know the double stance of lingering in imaginative musings and being firmly grounded in reality. Jesse Kornbluth’s razor edge prose and dialogue capture love’s triumph and ensuing agony. I could not put it down.” —ESTHER PEREL, author of the international bestseller Mating In Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence “You look to guys like Jesse Kornbluth for books like this one, and thank God we’ve got him. Obsessively researched, cuttingly wise, Kornbluth turns Mary Meyer from a footnote in the story of JFK into a star.” —LUCIAN TRUSCOTT IV, author of the New York Times bestseller Dress Gray Read more About the Author Jesse Kornbluth is a New York-based writer. As a journalist, he was a contributing editor for Vanity Fair and New York magazines. His books include Highly Confident: The Crime and Punishment of Michael Milken and Married Sex: A Love Story. In digital media, he was editorial director for America Online; he now edits a cultural concierge website, HeadButler.com. Read more Customers Review: For such a big subject, surprisingly touching. Surprisingly familiar. A bright and generous woman allows world shaking characters, confusions, conspiracies and commitments to ring with basic, colloquial truth. Bravo to the author, who keeps our feet on the ground; recognizing it, of course, as the very quality that may have made Mary so extraordinary.
YOU’LL LOVE IT!! A real page turner. It’s well known that JFK had affairs. Who knew they were almost daily? That Jackie stayed away most of the time? That there was one person he had a real relationship with, Mary Meyer? Totally believable fact based story; the facts don’t get in the way. Fascinating footnotes that illuminate the real life characters.
I have been intrigued for many years by the figure of Mary Pinchot Meyer and the role she played in the life of JFK, so I picked up this book with great interest. I was struck immediately by the the ineptitude of the writing, particularly the attempts at dialogue between Kennedy and Mary Meyer, which apart from their awkward strangeness, jump out as totally out of place in a diary. The book is empty, and so are the two main characters.I was repulsed by the author’s depiction of Mary as brittle, cold, unfeeling, spiritually adrift. There were two passages in particular that troubled me with what they conveyed about her view of human relationships. Both of these came toward the end so they had the effect of a summing up. On p. 127 she says, “What I learned from Jack…what Jack believed…is that you’re never really bonded with anyone. Even if you think you are, it’s never complete. In the end, after all the wishing for intimacy, he gave up…he sold aloneness as a life truth very convincingly to himself. And, by circumstance, to me.” She goes on to say she’s alone, that her kids will soon be “gone for good.” This blithe dismissal of the disappearance of her two remaining sons from her life is truly bizarre as it is so out of keeping with the deep grief that consumed this woman for years after the tragic death of her son Michael.In case we might think this is just a temporary reaction to grief, that she’s trying to protect herself from the pain of loss, we have her chilling comment on p. 171, the entry on Oct. 7, one week before her death:”Today I don’t want any more time with Jack. Or to have the time we had back. Today I wish I’d had a better use for these almost three years. I wish I’d done something else.” I felt a cold chill down my spine when I read that. And then in the Oct. 9 entry, she says essentially the same thing, this time after pondering what her shrink told her: “Isn’t it maybe better to recognize we’re all options in other people’s lives and our most important priority is our independence?”Her statement on the next page that “La vie est belle” sounds arbitrary, shallow and totally unconvincing. In a matter to days, she jumps from near-nihilism to Pollyanna-ism.What are we to make of this? The unavoidable conclusion is that Jesse Kornbluth has no real understanding of Mary Meyer, and certainly no respect for Kennedy. His two main characters are made of cardboard, or perhaps ice. The JFK we meet in these pages — THROUGH MARY’S EYES — is stunningly cruel to Jackie, completely self-absorbed, arrogant and egotistical. And Mary Meyer, as portrayed by Kornbluth, is also a lost soul — to the extent that we know her at all. Is this book a deliberate attempt on Kornbluth’s part to reduce this love affair to nothingness and portray the two people involved in the most unsympathetic light possible? It may be. But the likelier conclusion is that the author, for all his much vaunted research and footnoting, had no idea who he was writing about. It is telling that he omits from his Bibliography the only book on Mary Meyer written by someone who actually knew her, Peter Janney’s Mary’s Mosaic. The Mary Meyer portrayed in Kornbluth’s book is almost a photo negative of the person Janney describes.Perhaps the strangest thing about this book is its title. It is, emphatically, NOT a love story. Those looking for penetrating insight into JFK and Mary Meyer will not find it here.
Loved this book! I was 7-8 when this happened…old enough to be aware, but too young to appreciate the full and lasting impact at the time. Yes, this is a novel and the mystery may never be solved about the two central killings in this story, Yet this is much more than fiction. The author weaves in so many informative facts within the diary itself but more importantly, the footnotes. When you read this pithy novel, do yourself a favor and pay attention to the footnotes please.As a student of history, I appreciated the fascinating research. As a (relatively ) informed and concerned citizen, it made me think seriously about how power is wielded, manipulated and abused. Moreover, I was deeply moved by the human drama. Ms. Meyers is now but a vague memory and she deserves more than being labeled a cold case from the 60s. I am recommending this to my reader friends and book group.
I think it was Oscar Wilde or P.T. Barnum who once said, “Any publicity is good publicity.” Oscar Wilde however also had a caveat at the end of that sentence, which read: “. . . as long as it’s intelligent.” This book is anything but. Having researched and written the book “Mary’s Mosaic” over a period of many years, Mr. Kornbluth’s fantasy of Mary Meyer’s diary is worse than “fake news,” and does not even rise to “fake fiction.” His characterizations of both Mary Meyer and JFK are wooden, vapid, spiritually bereft figures that bare no resemblance to either of these two or what their relationship was actually like. Claiming that he read over “150 books about JFK,” and then being able to “channel Mary Meyer” when it came to imagining this so-called diary, “I would show up everyday and Mary would tell me what to do,” he told one interviewer on YouTube. For someone who calls himself a “journalist” who boasts of himself with celebrity Vanity Fair status, Jesse Kornbluth can’t even get his facts straight in his cursory footnotes, much less include my book “Mary’s Mosaic” in his bibliography, which he references throughout this fantasy affair he’s created. On page #67, for instance in his footnote, he states, “Peter Janney recounts a two-hour interview he recorded with Timothy Leary in 1990 . . .” which has no basis in fact. The interview he refers to was an interview Leary did with the author Leo Damore. You would think that anyone who considers themselves to be a so-called journalist might want to be correct in their references to the past, but not Kornbluth. His footnotes, however disjointed, which he claims, were based on his “research,” are so riddled with egregious errors to numerous to mention. What Kornbluth has created here is a kind of unimaginative “fictional pornography.” He doesn’t even mention (nor obviously comprehend) that the so-called “artist’s sketchbook” that Ben Bradlee claimed as the diary was not Mary’s real diary; the entire story was invented by Bradlee and others to cover up the fact that Bradlee (and very likely with the CIA’s Jim Angleton) under oath testified at the 1965 trial that he entered Mary’s artist studio on the night of the murder with no problem. All available evidence points to the fact that this was when the real diary was removed. Readers, don’t be fooled at this attempt to understand who Mary Meyer and JFK were together, or apart. I understand why many people are so intrigued by what took place in this relationship. Our most important real history in this country has been kept from us. “Mary’s Mosaic” has been an attempt on my part to correct an extremely important period in our history. Don’t allow the likes of all the Jesse Kornbluths to corrupt your search for the truth and meaning about anything. These people are nothing but charlatans who want to deprive you from approaching the real truth of what actually took place during the era of Cold War history. |
37 reviews