Dawn Tripp presents JACKIE, A NOVEL with Caitlin Shetterly

Join Mechanics' Hall & Print: A Bookstore in welcoming a conversation between Dawn Tripp and Caitlyn Shetterly.

In this mesmerizing novel of the life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, bestselling author Dawn Tripp has crafted an intimate story of love and power, family and tragedy, loss, and reinvention.

JACKIE is the story of a woman who forged a legacy out of grief and shaped history even as she was living it—a deeply private person with a nuanced, formidable intellect. It is the story of a love affair, a complicated marriage, and the fracturing of identity that comes in the wake of unthinkable violence.

When Jackie meets the charismatic congressman Jack Kennedy in Georgetown, she is twenty-one and dreaming of France. She has won an internship at Vogue, and she thinks Kennedy is not her kind of adventure: “Too American. Too good-looking. Too boy.” Yet she is drawn to his mind, his humor, and his drive. The chemistry between them ignites. During the White House years, the love between two independent people deepens. Then, a motorcade in Dallas: “Three and a half seconds—that’s all it was—a slivered instant between the first shot, which missed the car, and the second, which did not. . . .A hypnotic burst of sunlight off her bracelet as she waved.”

This spellbinding novel is a window into the world of a woman who led many different lives: Jackie, Jacks, Jacqueline, Miss Bouvier, Mrs. Kennedy, Mrs. Onassis, Jackie O. It is at once a deeply human story and a captivating work of imagination that comes right up against what she was thinking and feeling, what she was afraid of, fought for, and believed in.

Dawn Tripp is the author of the novel Georgia, which was a national bestseller, finalist for the New England Book Award, and winner of the Mary Lynn Kotz Award for Art in Literature. She is the author of three previous novels: Game of Secrets, Moon Tide, and The Season of Open Water, which won the Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction. Her poems and essays have appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, AGNI, Conjunctions, and NPR. She serves on the board of the Boston Book Festival and on the board of Gnome Surf: A non-profit Surf Therapy Organization focused on creating a culture shift towards kindness, love, and acceptance for athletes of all abilities. She graduated from Harvard and lives in Massachusetts with her sons.

Caitlin Shetterly is the author of Modified, Made for You and Me, the bestselling Fault Lines: Stories of Divorce, and the novel, Pete and Alice in Maine. Pete and Alice in Maine, published in 2023, is her first novel and was reviewed by The New York Times with glowing praise: “Shetterly’s debut achieves a subtle grace, a quality of light and shadow worthy of a Bergman film.”

Shetterly’s work has been featured in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Orion, Elle, Self, The Boston Globe, LitHub, Romper, and on Oprah.com, as well as This American Life and various other public radio shows. She is an editor at large for Frenchly, a French arts and culture online news magazine, for which she writes the popular Le Weekend newsletter. A Maine native, she graduated with Honors from Brown University and now lives with her two sons and husband in her home state.

Host or Publisher Mechanics' Hall (Maine)