Having one’s book optioned for television feels like dropping your child off for the first day of school: Will they make friends or be hung upside down from the monkey bars? Now that I’ve seen the new FX mini-series Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette, it seems I needn’t have worried. All is upright, and in much better lighting. The two leads—Paul Anthony Kelly, as Kennedy, and Sarah Pidgeon, as Bessette—are so appealing that I was lost in the sun-splashed depiction of the era of cash transactions and newsstands with actual newspapers.
The process brought me back to the gestational period of writing my 2024 biography of Bessette, Once upon a Time, when it was just a spark of an idea, and reminded me why I wrote it in the first place. I felt Carolyn had been misrepresented by a misogynistic tabloid media and wanted to put her life and choices in this context. In hindsight, I wonder if part of the pull toward a Kennedy story was also a longing for a time when we moved forward on equal and civil rights, rather than sliding backward.
